Two men have been sentenced to 30 months in jail by a Paris court for an April 2013 attack on a gay couple who were walking arm in arm in the city’s 19th arrondissement.
According to Pink News, K Taieb and M Abdel Malik, both 19, also received 15 months’ probation. A third man, T Kide, 21, will not serve time in prison as the court found he did not take part in the attack; instead, he was given six months’ probation for not intervening. A fourth alleged attacker, who is under the age of 18, will reportedly face trial in youth court, but the date is unspecified.
In the aftermath of the attack, Wilfred de Bruijn posted photos of himself with a bloodied face and a missing tooth and wrote an accompanying message that said, “Sorry to show you this . . . it’s the face of homophobia.” De Bruijn also sustained broken bones around his eyes.
A French advocacy group has claimed that the campaign against gay marriage led to a surge in anti-LGBT discrimination in 2013.
French President François Hollande signed off on his country’s contentious and hard-fought gay-marriage law in May last year.
SOS Homophobie’s annual report states that the group received 3,500 reports of homophobic and transphobic discrimination, covering insults posted on the internet or heard on the streets and at work, as well as threats and physical attacks. They claim a 78-percent increase in reports of such incidents last year compared to 2012.
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