In other circumstances, Lionel Dumont might have become a romantic French adventurer-poet like Arthur Rimbaud, or an idealistic revolutionary like Che Guevara. But when Dumont (26) was sentenced to 20 years in prison for armed robbery and homicide by a court in the central Bosnian town of Zenica this week, there was little sympathy for him in France.
The French government still wants to extradite the errant Islamic warrior for armed robberies around the northern French town of Roubaix in early 1996.
How does a middle-class, Catholic Frenchman born in an affluent suburb of Lille become a Muslim, fight with the Bosnian army and then turn to gangsterism in the name of Islam? The only explanation has been that offered by his sister this week: "He is a sincere person," she said. "Anyone who hasn't been in a war can't imagine what derailed him."
Lionel Dumont wanted to be a journalist and was studying history when he dropped out of university in 1992 to volunteer for the French army, which sent him to Somalia as a UN peacekeeper.
There, something seemed to break inside him. "The sight of such poverty strangles me," he wrote in his local church bulletin. He tried unsuccessfully to find work, first as a journalist, then as an aid worker. Discouraged and tired of waiting, he drove to Bosnia at the end of 1993, where he joined an aid group reportedly run by Algerian Islamic extremists.
When Dumont came home for a visit, he refused to drink wine or eat ham; he had converted to Islam and asked friends to call him Abou Hamza. Influenced by another French mujahid, a medical school drop-out named Christophe Caze, he became a fighter in the Bosnian army's 'Muslim Brigade'. Caze had married a Bosnian woman, and it was at his home in Zenica that Dumont would court a 16-year-old Bosnian girl named Azhra, whom he married last year.
When the Bosnian war ended, the US put pressure on the Sarajevo government to clamp down on foreign Islamists. Dumont and his friends returned to northern France, where they carried out a series of hold-ups to finance arms purchases.
On March 26th last year, French police attacked their small house. Four charred bodies were found inside the burned-out structure, but Dumont escaped and made his way back to Bosnia. Interpol informed the Zenica police that he was a wanted man, but it was only after he committed a series of armed robberies in which two Bosnians were killed that they decided to act.
Dumont became the first wanted man to have his photograph posted by the Bosnian authorities. He was arrested on March 9th this year after a dawn shoot-out in Zenica, in the course of which his Djiboutian comrade was killed.
When he was sentenced along with another Frenchman, Mouloud Boughelane, this week, Judge Milan Veseljak said the tribunal "had taken account of the commitment of the two men" in fighting with the Bosnian army during the war. But, the judge added, "factual evidence justified the sentence handed down."