French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Tuesday he had requested that five “terrorists” be stripped of their
nationality.
“I asked the prime minister to strip five terrorists of their nationality,” Cazeneuve told the National Assembly.
French law only allows nationality to be stripped from a citizen who holds a second passport.
Last month a Moroccan-born jihadist was stripped of his French nationality and sent back to his country of birth because he posed a serious threat to national security according to the government.
Convicted terrorist Ahmed Sahnouni El Yaacoubi was expelled from France and deported to Morocco, France Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed.
Born in Casablanca in 1970, the convicted terrorist was sentence in March 2013 to seven years in prison for organizing a recruitment network for jihadists.
But while in prison Ahmed Sahnouni remained active, radicalizing several fellow prisoners, a source told the Huffington Post Maghreb.
In May 2014, the detainee’s French passport was taken away, the first such move on the part of French authorities since 2007.
“Given the particularly serious threat posed by having this individual on French soil” the interior minister decided to initiate expulsion proceedings against him, French authorities said in a statement.
Seventeen people with links to terrorism have been expelled from France since the beginning of the year, the statement concluded.
France has been on high alert since the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris which left 17 people dead.
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