House arrest for man arrested with guns at Disneyland Paris

FRANCE: A man found with guns in a Disneyland Paris hotel was on Tuesday condemned by a French court to six months' house arrest and made to wear an electronic tagging bracelet.

Prosecutors had sought a nine-month suspended sentence for the 28-year-old who was found to be carrying two handguns, ammunition and a Quran when he was arrested last Thursday.



Disneyland Paris said the guns were picked up by routine scanning of the man's bags at the hotel entrance.

A police source said at the time of the arrest that preliminary investigations did not point to terrorism, and that the man had said he was carrying the guns because he feared for his safety.

The Paris restaurant worker, a convert to Islam, will spend his sentence at his mother's house in the Loiret region southwest of Paris.

The court in the city of Meaux, east of the French capital, also banned him from carrying firearms for five years.

The defendant, with long hair in a bun and a short beard, told the court that he had bought his first gun to defend himself after being the victim of an act of aggression.

He added that he had acquired the second pistol after the November 13 militant attacks in Paris that  left 130 people dead.

Described as "a boy with a big heart" by his girlfriend and a "pathological liar " by the judge, the man told the court that had not wanted to leave his firearms at his mother's home where he was living.



Despite the discovery of the guns and the Quran, and after several militant attacks in and around Paris last year, investigators had quickly ruled out the possibility that the defendant had been planning a terror attack.

Prior to this case the defendant's only brush with the law had been for a traffic case.