“When I was very little I was called Spider-Man, because I climbed walls. Then it was ‘bun’.” Laughter in the courtroom, Tuesday, November 2. During his personality questioning before the special assize court in Paris, Mohamed Abrini looked back on his life before. Before he escorted the Abdeslam brothers from Brussels to Paris, on November 12, 2015. Before accompanying the two suicide bombers, on March 22, 2016, at Brussels-Zaventem airport. This life before begins with “a normal childhood, as many families are lucky enough to have”, described this 36-year-old Belgian behind the window of the huge glass box, very close to his “mate”, Salah Abdeslam.
Less media than his acolyte of Molenbeek, Mohamed Abrini is nonetheless one of the key defendants in the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015. He faces life imprisonment. “We did not come out of our mothers’ wombs with a Kalashnikov in hand: we were children”, he insisted on recalling. The man has a round face and a pale complexion, after more than five years in detention, in Belgium then “to the wonderful prison of Fresnes”, where he was transferred in early July, for trial.
Born on December 27, 1984 in Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, a small town in Brussels, he is the second of six children. His parents are Moroccans but he only has Belgian nationality, as he wished to remind in front of the court. In Molenbeek, he grew up without lacking anything: “I had everything I wanted, like my siblings”, he confided during his numerous interrogations since his arrest in April 2016. However, his school career has turned out to be chaotic. He gave up his training in mechanical welding before graduating and left school in the third grade. As a teenager, he dreams of becoming a professional footballer for a long time, qualifying as “exceptional player” facing the examining magistrates. But we did not give him a chance, he regrets. “School failure, sports failure, checkmate, what”, he summed up in front of the court.
He has “17 years and 359 days” when he made his first stay in prison for car theft, at the end of 2003. From then on, his record filled up: he totaled 12 convictions between 2002 and 2015. His specialty? The theft of trunks in car dealerships, which earned him the nickname “the Brink’s”, reference to the famous fund transport company. “There is also a whole series of driving without a license”, noted the president. Driving license that Mohamed Abrini has in fact never passed. “It was a matter of laziness.”
Between burglaries and going back and forth to prison, he did some odd jobs as a surface technician or server at Quick … “There was a bit of pruning too”, he remembered with difficulty during his personality questioning. He ends up opening a sandwich shop, in which he invests tens of thousands of euros of dirty money, resulting from his crimes.
He smokes cannabis, drinks, goes out a lot to nightclubs and regularly visits casinos. “It was an illness. I went there very often and all over Europe, the Netherlands, England, Spain…”, he explains. “What was it funded?” the president asked him. “I was selling sandwiches. It worked well.” He recounts with a certain nostalgia his trips to the Côte d’Azur, those days when he “could waste up to 5,000 euros per day”. And to comment, about this period: “I have had more than my fair share of happiness.”
In Molenbeek, “where everyone knows each other”, Mohamed Abrini occupies a central role in the gang of those who will become future terrorists. His closest neighbors and friends are Abdelhamid Abaaoud (coordinator of the November 13 attacks), Ahmed Dahmani (imprisoned in Turkey and suspected of being a logistician of the jihadist cell) and of course the Brahim brothers and Salah Abdeslam. “We have been neighbors with Salah for twenty-five years. I knew his whole family. In the evening, I closed my business, I went to his brother’s cafe”, he told the court. The bar Les Béguines, managed by Brahim Abdeslam (the kamikaze of Comptoir Voltaire) quickly became the center of all trafficking, where cannabis was sold and consumed without hiding. Mohamed Abrini goes there almost every day.
“We have the impression, between 2003 and 2014, that you didn’t really have a goal”, the president points out to him. It’s Molenbeek who wants that, retorts the accused. “Most of us failed at school. Growing up, there is no choice. Some people succeed, work, have families, children”, he detailed from his box. But to hear it, these people are rare. “If you put in the balance those who failed and those who succeeded, we are on 80-20. I am one of those who did not succeed”, he slices.
A decisive event will shake up Mohamed Abrini and push him into radicalization. While he was again imprisoned from January to September 2014, he learned, a week before his release, that his little brother Souleymane was killed in Syria, after having gone to fight with Abdelhamid Abaaoud. The prison director asks him to call his family. From then on, he had only one obsession: to go to Syria too. He who did not know much about religion began to read the Koran, regularly attended the mosque in his neighborhood and began to take a close interest in jihad.
To the sandwich shop, he more and more often invites the brothers Abdeslam and Ahmed Dahmani. All four were holding “radical remarks, watched jihadist videos and clearly supported the Islamic State”, Mohamed Abrini’s associate told investigators. At that time, dozens of them left Molenbeek to join the ranks of the Islamic State. When Abrini was released from prison in September 2014, “[son] neighborhood is empty because a lot of people were in Syria ”.
In November 2014, he sent several text messages to his fiancée, in which he delivered his hatred of non-Muslims and made no secret of his desire to go jihad. “I am going to fight to defend the cause of the Almighty, I have sisters who are being raped, little brothers and sisters who are being massacred”, he wrote to him in particular.
From June 23 to July 17, 2015, he made a trip to Turkey, during which he crossed the Syrian border. He stayed nine days in the country, including three in the city where his brother’s remains lay. The rest of the time, he is in Raqqa, where Najim Laachraoui, one of the suicide bombers in the Brussels attacks, and Abdelhamid Abaaoud regularly come to see him. He inherits a new nickname: “Abu Yahya”, the kunya (fighter’s name) from his brother Souleymane, which he takes over. Abdelhamid Abaaoud then asks him to go to England, to recover a sum of money, according to the statements of Mohamed Abrini before the examining magistrates. But investigators are wondering today if he not rather went to make scouting to instigate an attack on the football stadium in Manchester. A suspicion corroborated by a message found in the computer of one of the terrorists and evoking a project of attack, finally abandoned, on the occasion of Euro 2016.
It is finally in France that the now radicalized delinquent will play a central role, alongside the jihadist cell responsible for the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, on November 13, 2015. In the days preceding the attacks, he went on several trips. -returns with the Abdeslam brothers to reserve the hideouts for future commandos.
On the 11th, he was filmed in a service station in the Oise, north of Paris, with Salah Abdeslam, driving the Clio which was used two days later to commit the attacks. On the 12th, in the afternoon, he participated in the “death convoy”, as he explained during his hearing on June 1, 2016, according to the documents that France Inter was able to consult. Three cars carrying the terrorists follow each other and make a first stop in Charleroi, Belgium. He travels with them to the Bobigny hideout. He “kiss everyone one last time” and returns to Brussels by taxi, for 365 euros, on the night of November 12 to 13.
Two days after the attacks, his photo is circulating everywhere. On November 24, he was the subject of an international arrest warrant. Mohamed Abrini then begins his run, which will last more than four months. He is quickly picked up by the other members of the cell, who also hide themselves. In small groups, they go from hideout to hideout in the suburbs of Brussels. The last is located in Forest, a municipality in Brussels, where it is located with six other terrorists.
The group then decides to split up: Mohamed Abrini, Najim Laachraoui (one of the suicide bombers of Brussels) and Osama Krayem (suspected of having given up on blowing himself up at the last minute during the attacks in Brussels), join a last hideout. , from where they will leave to commit the attacks of March 22, 2016 in Brussels and Zaventem. When arrested on April 9, Mohamed Abrini admitted to being “the man in the hat” who was pushing a bomb on a cart that day. His run lasted three weeks longer than that of Salah Abdeslam and ended in Anderlecht, a few kilometers from the last hideout of his childhood friend.