Paris attacks: French court jails 2 for fake claim

PanARMENIAN.Net - A French court has jailed a couple who fraudulently obtained €60,000 from a fund set up to help survivors of last year's jihadist attacks in Paris, BBC News reports.

Sasa Damjanovic, 36, got six years and his partner Vera Vasic, 29, three years - the heaviest prison sentences to be handed down in France in such a case.

They claimed to have been outside the Stade de France on 13 November 2015 when the suicide bombers struck. In fact they had been at home in Antibes.

The November attacks killed 130 people.

The fraud by the couple from Antibes was exposed when they put in a claim for compensation for the Nice terror attack of 14 July this year. The Bastille Day attack killed 86 people on the Nice beachfront - victims of a lorry driver who smashed his huge vehicle into the crowd.

The court judgment in Grasse, near Nice and Antibes on the Cote d'Azur, said the penalty was intended to act as "an example".

The couple, who have two children, aged six and seven, admitted their crime in court.

The prosecutor, quoted by Nice-Matin news, said "as a citizen, man, woman, judge, how can you not be sickened by such behaviour?"

The couple have already spent the €60,000 - some of it on vehicles which they planned to re-sell. They told the court that they had sought the money to pay off debts.

A lawyer for the compensation fund said that by 30 November this year it had paid out €46.5m to 2,444 victims of the Paris attacks.

The jihadists, from so-called Islamic State (IS), injured hundreds of people, besides the 130 they killed in simultaneous attacks across Paris.