For several years, he was the face of anti-terrorism justice in France. The former public prosecutor of Paris François Molins is expected, Wednesday, November 16, at the helm of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015. The magistrate with the accent of the Pyrenees, whose press conferences accompanied the wave of attacks in France since 2012, will answer questions from the special assize court in Paris after the former Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve and the day after the former bosses of the DGSI and the DGSE. Two auditions to follow live on franceinfo.fr.
A first for the high magistrate. This is the first time, in his forty-year career, that the 68-year-old magistrate has testified at a trial. After seven years at the Paris prosecutor’s office, marked by the attacks in Toulouse and Montauban by Mohammed Merah in 2012, the attacks in Charlie hebdo, Montrouge and the Hyper Cacher in January 2015, those of November 13 the same year and that of Nice in 2016, François Molins is today Attorney General at the Court of Cassation, the highest post of prosecutor. “If I am quoted [au procès], I think it is to give my vision of things, to recall the main axes of the investigation when it was launched and to come back to the climate in which we were before, during and after the attack“, he explained to 20 minutes.
An attorney who is a master of the art of communication. Over the years, the French have discovered François Molins on television, during press conferences broadcast live. They also became familiar with his reassuring style, clear phrasing and surgical descriptions. We owe him in particular the expression of the apartments “conspiratorial” – where attacks are fomented –, borrowed from Basque terrorism files. “Today, judicial communication is part of the profession of prosecutor, it is an obligation”, François Molins told franceinfo.
The judicial follow-up of Samy Amimour in question. This “super proc”, as he is qualified in the media, should however answer delicate questions, such as the judicial follow-up of one of the Bataclan terrorists, Samy Amimour. This young Frenchman had been referred, indicted and placed under judicial supervision in 2012 as part of a plan to leave for Syria. Despite everything, he managed to get there in September 2013 with another Bataclan terrorist, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, file S. As noted by the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the attacks, “his administrative surveillance, abandoned with his indictment, in accordance with the principles of a fair trial and the rights of the defense, has not been replaced by any implementation by the courts of intelligence techniques”.
Bernard Cazeneuve on the same line as François Hollande? The previous week, the former head of state was heard for nearly four hours by the special assize court, a first for a French president. If he regretted that these attacks could not be thwarted and recognized that the fact that his name was mentioned in the claims of the Islamic State group had “makes you think about [sa] own responsibility “, François Hollande affirmed that he “will do[t] exactly the same “ today. Former Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve should also be questioned about the failure to prevent these attacks.