(Paris) Specific threats to the Bataclan, potential slowness of intervention by the BRI… At the trial of the November 13 attacks, the former Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve on Wednesday evacuated the controversial questions raised for six years by relatives the victims.
Supporting figures and without any note, the ex-first cop of France has been defending his action for nearly an hour before the special assize court in Paris when it spontaneously comes to controversies, anticipating future questions from family lawyers.
Were the police officers, just like soldiers from Operation Sentinel, “prevented from intervening” to put an end to the taking of hostages in the Bataclan? “Six years later, my conviction remains: we cannot bring in forces that are not specialized, unprepared,” said the former minister, adding that only the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) and the Research Assistance Intervention Dissuasion (RAID) brigade “could intervene to save the hostages”.
“Could this intervention have been faster? “, Then said Mr. Cazeneuve, then detailing the arrivals of each of the teams and underlining that the BRI is present in front of the Bataclan in” 25 minutes “, that is to say in the deadlines envisaged to face the risk of attack.
“I was very hurt – not on a personal basis, but for them, I am a passing minister – when I saw the way in which they were questioned,” he says.
No specific threat to the Bataclan in 2015
In the same way, he would have taken, “it is obvious”, “the arrangements to ensure the protection” of the Bataclan if he had been informed of any threat, mentioned by civil parties and former police officials.
Bernard Cazeneuve says it “solemnly before the court”: he “never received a note” or “any document” in this sense. “By what strange logic” he would have left the auditorium without protection, he retorts again, faced with the insistence of certain civil party lawyers.
Heard after him on this “returning question”, the former Paris prosecutor François Molins confirms: if the Bataclan “may have appeared as a potential target” in 2009, as part of an investigation targeting a former figure of radical Islam, “at no time” was the magistrate six years later “in possession of elements” on any threat.
The former Minister of the Interior returned to another controversy: the “way in which Salah Abdeslam was arrested on the morning of November 14” 2015. The way in which the only surviving member of the commandos projected by the Islamic State ( EI) has been “controlled”, corrects Bernard Cazeneuve.
In the aftermath of the attacks which killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis, Salah Abdeslam fled to Belgium, helped by two accomplices, also tried by his side. Controlled on the highway by French gendarmes, Salah Abdeslam continued on his way and was not arrested until four months later in Brussels.
This failure is one of the “blind spots” of European judicial cooperation at the time denounced by Bernard Cazeneuve.
“The legal framework in force at the time did not allow his arrest”, summarizes the former Prime Minister. “The control system at the European Union’s external borders was insufficient,” he admits.
“Permanently haunted”
Asked about his personal experience of November 13, he evacuates again: “what I felt is nothing compared to the unfathomable pain of families”. This is why he “remained extremely discreet” on his feelings after that night of horror, explains the former Minister of the Interior.
The armor finally cracks when a lawyer asks him if he has “regrets”, given his knowledge of the state of the threat in France, faced in 2015 with an unprecedented wave of attacks and multiple departures of its nationals in Syria.
“Could we have done otherwise? », Answers the witness. “Not a day went by that I didn’t ask myself if there was something I could have done that I didn’t do. This question haunts me all the time, ”he admits.
“Despite the mobilization, attacks have occurred, lives have been shattered, the French are inconsolable”, continues the former Prime Minister.
“I can only wonder […] and I will continue to question myself until my last breath, ”he said again.
The hearing of the former Minister of the Interior lasted more than three hours. Neither the national anti-terrorism prosecution nor the defense lawyers asked him any questions.