The verdict is expected on Wednesday March 9 at the trial of the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack. The Special Assize Court of Paris is currently deliberating and judging four men, for their participation or their links with the two terrorists who killed the priest Jacques Hamel, in his church on July 26, 2016.
>> Trial of the Saint-Etienne-Du-Rouvray attack: “I beg your pardon”, begs one of the accused
Three defendants are present in the box, tried for “criminal terrorist association”. The fourth defendant is absent. This is Rachid Kassim, who is on trial for complicity but this Frenchman is presumed dead in Iraq in 2017. The other three have been in pre-trial detention since the summer of 2016, and spoke last Wednesday morning. One of the defendants took the time to thank the civil parties. This is Farid Khelil, accused in particular of having encouraged his cousin, one of the terrorists, in his plan for an Islamist attack.
Farid Khelil leans against the railing of the box. He hesitates for a moment and says: “I carry – I don’t know if I can say it – I carry my cross, I carry my pain.” A clear reference to the Catholic religion, at the heart of this trial. The 36-year-old accused then thanked the civil parties for their hope and compassion. He holds back this handkerchief, held out by the daughter of the parishioner seriously injured by the terrorists. He holds back the strength of the murdered priest’s sister, Roseline Hamel, seated across from him, who nods at his words. The 36-year-old asks the court for a second chance.
“I have changed. These (almost) six years in prison have not been in vain. I will do everything to be a good father, a good citizen, a good man. As Father Hamel was.”
Farid Khelil, accusedduring the trial of the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack
Jean-Philippe Steven Jean-Louis also addressed the civil parties, showing them his “compassion” and his “affection”. “The 30 days that I made with you [le temps du procès]I learned a lot”, he says. The man who admitted having tried to go to Syria twice with Abdel-Malik Petitjean, having massively relayed Daesh propaganda and having launched jackpots to finance radical Islamism, said he took the words of the lawyers for the civil parties as “words of education” because they don’t have them “poorly spoken”. He takes that “like a lesson”.
Assuring “having learned more in prison than in all the previous years”the 25-year-old recognizes the work on himself that he still has to do: “I have to move forward on the psychological level. I am not someone finished. (…) I am aware that it will not happen in a day.” He wants to take degrees in philosophy or history and “thanks” the general counsels who saw that he was “someone fragile” and that he “we have to put things in place in [son] course of detention“.
The third defendant, Yassine Sebaihia, 27, who had traveled from Toulouse to meet the future attackers in Seine-Maritime a few days before the attack, spoke more briefly, contenting himself with repeating that he did not “never wanted to participate in an attack [ni] go to Syria”. He says he was “deeply saddened by what happened”. The Advocates General requested seven to fourteen years of imprisonment against these three defendants. They face up to thirty years of criminal imprisonment.