French influencer jailed for 6 months over viral syringe-attack ‘prank’

A French influencer has been jailed for six months for faking syringe attacks on unsuspecting members of the public in a viral prank video.

Ilan M., who goes by the online handle ‘Amine Mojito,’ was arrested after the video shared to TikTok shortly before the Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) in June sparked widespread outrage.

In the clip, captioned “Mojito le piqueur fou” (the mad stinger), the 27-year-old pretended to inject people with an empty syringe and filmed their horrified reactions.

The sick pranks caused a stir in France, coming as the country was gripped by panic over reports of needle attacks at student parties and festivals.

Police received 145 reports of needle spiking during the June music festival, although few concrete cases were found.

The public prosecutor alleged Mojito, intentionally or not, had encouraged the phenomenon through his pranks.

Prosecutors last month requested a sentence of 15 months in prison under electronic monitoring, including five months suspended.

On Friday, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Mojito to 12 months in prison, six of which were suspended, for “violence with a weapon that did not result in incapacity for work,” French newspaper Libération reported.

He was also fined $1,759.95 (AU$2,660) and given a three-year ban on owning or carrying a weapon.

Mojito told the court he had been “in his own world” and “didn’t know anything,” according to the report.

“I had the very bad idea of doing these pranks by imitating what I saw on the internet, in Spain, in Portugal,” he said. “I didn’t think it could hurt people. That was my mistake, I didn’t think about others, I thought about myself.”

His lawyer, Marie Claret de Fleurieu, told Libération the sentence “brings the debates back into more proportion after the initial media frenzy” and “restores a little balance between the preservation of public order and that of the fundamental rights of my client.”

Mojito’s lawyers had requested “clemency” from the court, noting he had spent nearly two months in pre-trial detention, where he was placed in solitary confinement for his own safety.

However, many French social media users expressed outrage at the perceived lenient sentence.

“Six months is not enough,” one wrote.

“The gesture is revolting, even with an empty syringe. The risk of spreading this kind of video is that crazies will imitate it with harmful substances.”

“Even if it was a ‘prank’, I imagine that some of the people who were tricked must have lived in terror at the thought of having been actually stabbed and contaminated by something,” another said.