Born: December 2nd, 1965;

Place of Birth: Bordj Bou Arreridj, Algeria;

Gender: Male;

Nationality: Algerian, French (stripped in 2006);

General Info:
Djamel Beghal is a Algerian man convicted of plotting terrorist attack on U.S. embassy in Paris.

He married his wife Sylvie (a French citizen) in 1990, while working as a youth worker in Corbeil-Essonnes. In 1997, he moved his family to Leicester, where Sylvie still lives with their four children.

In 2006 he was stripped of the French citizenship which he had acquired through his marriage. Beghal was released from prison and expelled to Algeria on 16 July 2018.

Terror Activities:
On 28 July 2001, he was arrested at Dubai International Airport while transferring from a flight from Pakistan to a flight to Europe he held a fake French passport.

Over the next two months, he was tortured by the Emirati police, with the alleged complicity of the British and French governments.

Beghal confessed to UAE authorities that he was conspiring to destroy the U.S. embassy in Paris. After he was extradited to France on 1 October, Beghal retracted his statement, saying that it had been given under torture.

In October 2001, Beghal told magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere that he had visited Osama bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan and planned a suicide bomb attack.

In March 2005, French authorities convicted Beghal and five others for planning the attacks, and Beghal began serving his 10-year sentence.

During his time in prison, he met and mentored fellow prisoners Cherif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who committed the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting, as well as Amedy Coulibaly, who carried out the Fontenay-aux-Roses shooting and Porte de Vincennes siege.