Former safety aide to Macron sentenced to 1 yr in jail

A former safety aide to French President Emmanuel Macron who triggered controversy by assaulting a protester at a 2018 May Day march was convicted Friday of unlawful violence and different offenses and sentenced to a yr’s imprisonment.
A Paris court docket discovered Alexandre Benalla, 30, responsible of deliberate violence within the 2018 incident within the capital, at which Macron was not current.
He was additionally convicted of illegally carrying a gun at a 2017 Macron campaigning occasion, and unlawful use of diplomatic passports after he left the president’s service.
Benalla acquired a three-year jail sentence — two years of which had been suspended — and shall be allowed to spend the remaining 12 months at his mom’s dwelling offered he wears an digital tag.
Benalla’s actions, and the best way Macron’s workplace responded to them, had brought about the French chief’s first political disaster.
In withering feedback, the court docket’s decide Isabelle Prevost-Desprez mentioned Benalla had displayed “a sense of omnipotence and impunity … sowed doubt concerning the leadership of the Elysee and damaged the image of the presidency.” At the guts of the controversy was Benalla’s murky position on the presidential Elysee Palace, the place a police safety contingent is charged with defending the president.
There was intense media protection and a televised parliamentary inquiry put high Elysee officers, usually invisible to the general public, at centre stage.
Criticism centred on why the aide had used violence in opposition to the demonstrator within the May Day confrontation as police stood by watching. Benalla was allegedly on the demonstration as an observer.
“It was war,” Benalla advised investigators, insisting that as an observer he had no intention of appearing violently however intervened as a result of it was his civic responsibility.
“You cast shame on the job of a police officer,” Prevost-Desprez mentioned Friday, addressing Benalla in court docket.
At the tip of 2018, the French press revealed that Benalla held two diplomatic passports, used for journey to African international locations, after being dismissed from his job on the presidential palace.
Benalla didn’t communicate through the sentencing, and he didn’t reply questions from reporters exterior afterwards.