Elon Musk slams Ireland following claim illegal immigrants get shorter sentences

Tech giant Elon Musk has slammed Ireland following a claim on his X social media platform that illegal immigrants get shorter sentences.

Musk reposted a post from an Irish user and said: "Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up."

The post in question contained screenshots of parts of two articles from 2001 and 2003 which described a case in which an Algerian man was sentenced to 10 years with 18 months suspended for the rape of one woman and the rape and kidnapping of another woman.

The screenshots were posted alongside a tweet which said: "For over 20 years, Muslim illegal immigrants have been handed lesser sentences for raping women in Ireland.

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"Sid Ahmed Benflici assaulted an Irish woman in October 1999 and spent just 3 months in prison. On April 16th, 2000, he kidnapped and raped an Irish woman. Just 2 days later, on the 18th, he raped another Irish woman. He was given 3 months for assaulting the first woman. He was given 6 years for the first rape, and the judge said if he was Irish, he would have been sentenced to 10 years.

"For the second rape, he was sentenced to 10 years, but the judge suspended 18 months, so the sentence was 8.5 years. Ireland is a broken country."

It was posted by an Irish individual whose bio reads: "Irish. Banned by Twitter regime. Restored by Elon and X." followed by a cover photo sporting the hashtag "IrelandBelongsToTheIrish".

The claim made in the post that Irish people serve longer sentences than migrants who are in the country illegally cannot be verified.

According to an article from 2017 which was published by the Irish Examiner, an Irish man by the name of Michael Murray was jailed for the rape and sexual assault of a woman and had his 15-year prison sentence increased to 19 years as a result of an appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

He had abducted the woman’s child in the same incident which saw charges brought against him of attempted rape, oral rape, and aggravated sexual assault, child abduction, threats to kill or cause serious harm, false imprisonment, and theft, at a Dublin apartment on February 12 and 13, 2010.

More recently, in July 2024, Jonathon Moran was sentenced to 9 years in prison for the rape Bláthnaid Raleigh in July 2019.

In 2002, the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Report (SAVI) highlighted that just one in ten victims of sexual crime in Ireland will report their assaults.

Of that one in ten, just 7% will secure a conviction meaning that out of 100 victims of sexual crime only 10 report that crime and less than 1% or barely one victim from that 100 will see their attacker pay for their crimes.