Syria23 September, 20262 min read
Paris Court Sentences Othman Garrido To 30 Years For Islamic State Crimes In Syria
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Othman Garrido, 32, sentenced to 30 years by a Paris special court for ISIS crimes. Convicted of murders in an organized gang; acquitted of direct murder charges.
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Garrido sentenced in Paris
A French court in Paris sentenced Othman Garrido to 30 years in prison for crimes of murder within an organized group and his belonging to the Islamic State organization in Syria. The Paris special assize court issued the verdict against the 32-year-old Frenchman at the end of a trial that lasted a week.
Garrido insisted that he "never killed anyone" and "never participated in any execution," but he seemed unable to speak when questioned on September 21, 2026 about the “public beheading” that occurred in Syria in 2015. The ruling included a provision that he cannot be eligible for parole for 20 years, and the court also acquitted him of the murder charge while finding him guilty of murders in an organized gang during a double public execution in 2015 in Syria and of terrorist criminal association.
Photos, executions, and defense
The Paris trial centered on photos found on a mobile phone that allegedly belonged to Garrido’s wife, recovered by Americans in Syria after Daesh’s defeat in 2019 by an international coalition.
The prosecution relied on clothing, posture, and silhouette to conclude that the partially masked man in one photo was Garrido, while the court recognized him as having participated in a double execution of two Iranians in September 2015 at al-Qaryatayn, in Syria.
Me Antoine Ory told AFP that the court took into account Garrido’s time in detention and logically acquitted him of the murder charge.
Me Louise el-Yafi, lawyer for the French Victims of Terrorism Association (AFVT), told the accused, "Is he concealing something, is he sincere? The truth is I don’t know".
ISIS links and wider cases
Turkey arrested Garrido in 2020 and extradited him to France, after Garrido left France in 2012 to join ISIS in Syria and called himself Abu Salman the French. The trial also drew on the case context that about 1,500 French citizens have gone to Iraq and Syria in the past decade to join the Islamic State, and the court heard that Garrido appeared in 2014 in a seven-minute video titled "What are you waiting for?" released by ISIS’s media branch.
In Paris, the attorney general sought imprisonment for Garrido with a 22-year security sentence, arguing that he was a torturer for the Islamic State in Syria, while the defense urged the court to grant him some "horizon" of release. In a separate case tied to the same ISIS network, Corse Matin said six French nationals were being tried starting Sunday in Baghdad on charges related to the jihadist group Islamic State, with the death penalty at stake.