A new page has turned. After a first sequence devoted to the investigation and the trying testimonies of the civil parties, the river trial of the attacks of November 13 has just closed a second part, with the end of the interrogations of the accused over the period preceding the summer of 2015. Despite the interruptions linked to Covid-19, the special assize court of Paris has come to the end of this exercise (before a new suspension caused by positive cases among the accused, which must last at least until March 1).
Little by little, the inert and uniform block formed by the fourteen men present at the hearing (six other men are judged by default) came to life. Between the “heavyweights” and the “second knives”, those who have exercised their right to silence and those who have spoken, the accused who recognize part of the facts and the others who minimize or claim their innocence, a variety of speeches, of attitudes and lines of defense emerged. A puzzle with holes, especially with regard to the process of radicalization.
This was the central question of these interrogations: “What is your relationship to religion?” The choice was made not to address this aspect during the personality interviews, because it is inseparable from the facts and the qualification of the prosecution. “In these trials, [la religion] becomes an element which intervenes to qualify the AMT, the association of terrorist criminals. [Elle] intervenes in the subjective element of AMT, under the prism of radicalization”explains for France Culture Anne Wyvekens, director of research at the CNRS and member of the research team working on the trial.
For the civil parties, this notion of radicalization has remained “fuzzy” throughout the proceedings, the court walked on eggshells, even with the defendants whose commitment to the deadly ideology of the Islamic State (IS) group is claimed. “The term radicalization has become taboo, deplores Samia Maktouf, lawyer for several civil parties. It has not been given its proper place when it is an essential link in the chain.” In fact, what have we understood of the switch of some of the accused to radical Islam and jihadism?
Six of them were to participate in the attacks in Paris, or those in Brussels in March 2016. The Tunisian Sofien Ayari, the Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini and the Franco-Moroccan Salah Abdeslam say they have given up. Swede Osama Krayem remains silent. The Pakistani Muhammad Usman and the Algerian Adel Haddadi were detained in Greece, then arrested in Austria a month after November 13, 2015. What pushed these men from different countries? All have more or less held the same speech, situating the turn after the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, in the early 2010s.
Muhammad Usman, known in Pakistan for having studied in a madrasa (a Koranic school) before joining the Taliban, claims to have been “turn the brain” via Facebook by a certain “Abu Obeida”having told him to go “at Cham” (the term used by IS to designate Syria). His traveling companion, the Algerian Adel Haddadi, claims to have left his goldfinch farm for Syria on the advice of a “Abu Ali”also met on Facebook and whose traces have never been found by the investigators. “I saw what was happening in Syria, something touched me”he told the court through his interpreter.
Salah Abdeslam also says he was “touch” by the “images of the bombings of the Bashar Al-Assad regime or the coalition, I don’t know”. Invoking his “humanity”he places his commitment on a ground “Politics” and non-religious, like his co-defendant Sofien Ayari. This former computer science student, the first to have made the effort to explain the reasons for his rallying to the IS, affirms that if he fought in its ranks, it was by “political choice” linked to his “anger” to the situation in Syria. Arguments that are far from convincing the civil parties.
“They come to sell us a kind of product: the nice terrorist who went to war in Spain, who entered into resistance against very unjust things.”
Gérard Chemla, civil party lawyerat franceinfo
For Didier Seban, another civil party lawyer, it is above all this “global call for the constitution of a caliphate” who met “a very strong echo in societies with lost young people”. Today, adherence to this project, its propaganda and its practices is still total among a large part of the accused, like Mohamed Abrini, “the man in the hat” of the Brussels attacks. “For you, it’s radical. For me, it’s normal Islam”, he said during his interrogation. The filmed beheadings of hostages? “You too have cut off your king’s head.” The rapes of Yazidi women? “It was done in all the conquests… Historians call it a birth plan.”
Alongside them, seven other defendants are doing everything, on the contrary, to get rid of the “radicalization” label, which earned them twenty years in prison – or life in the event of a repeat offense. Not only do they have to demonstrate that they were not radicalized, but also that they were unaware of the radicalization of their friends or their brother. Sometimes, it is witnesses who take care of it for them, like this uncle of the Belgian-Moroccan Yassine Atar, younger brother of Oussama Atar, presumed sponsor of the attacks of November 13. He maintains that his nephew “is the spiritual son of Baccus, the god of vice and sex [dans la mythologie romaine]. He was cheating on his wife, and his wife knows it, that’s why they broke up. (…) He scoured the brothels of Tangier [au Maroc]. What the Islamic State offers is far from the brothels of Tangier!”
For Mohamed Amri, Salah Abdeslam’s conveyor from Paris to Brussels on the evening of November 13, 2015, it is his wife who certifies that this former Samu social worker has agreed to pick up his boyfriend because he is “too kind”. “I am not radicalizedsupports her husband from the box. The word radicalized, I did not know it before the detention, the taqiya [le fait pour un musulman de dissimuler sa croyance]all that…” The other two conveyors of Salah Abdeslam, they appear free. In their defence, Hamza Attou and Ali Oulkadi highlight the codes of their neighborhood life: “You can’t understand, madam, we’re not from the same social class. We help each other. Sometimes, in Brussels, to buy a baguette, we can go there at ten.”
Since the facts after the summer of 2015 cannot yet be addressed, the court also questioned some of the defendants about their stay in Syria. But of this life under the Islamic State, whose regime of terror has already been widely documented by investigators and witnesses on the stand, we had to be satisfied with accounts so little credible that they have become comical. Adel Haddadi and Muhammad Usman portrayed themselves as idle recruits, “helpful” and “obedient”. The first says he only did a week of military training before cooking “omelets” in a restaurant in Raqqa. The second guarantees not to have fought during his stay in Fallujah in Iraq.
Neither of them explains why the Opex, the cell responsible for organizing the attacks in Europe, chose them for a suicide mission with the two Iraqi suicide bombers at the Stade de France. “Verbally, I had said that I accepted, but between myself, I was not for”tent, in his broken French, Adel Haddadi. “I didn’t know what the mission was”, swears Muhammad Usman, who affirms that he had renounced it at the time of his arrest. Sofien Ayari and Salah Abdeslam (the only one who did not go to Syria) also asserted that they did not have all the information on the attacks, “for the safety of the person and the organization”. “Everyone had their little secret (…) and in the end, boom, everyone came together”claims Salah Abdeslam.
To learn more, the court could not count on Osama Krayem, who had been very talkative during the investigation, nor on Mohamed Bakkali, already sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the foiled attack on the Thalys. Calling this lawsuit a“illusion”, these two defendants, who face life imprisonment, felt that the dice were already cast for them. After the hearings of the civil parties, “difficult to take”, “I no longer have the strength to fight or explain myself”argued Mohamed Bakkali, fired for his logistical support to the November 13 commandos.
If lawyer Gérard Chemla regrets two “missed appointments”he interprets this silence as a “confession of guilt” in the face of the damning elements of the file, such as this video of the immolation of a Jordanian pilot projected at the hearing, and on which appears Osama Krayem. But the criminal lawyer concedes: “We have seen that the shell of some defendants had cracked with the hearing of the victims.”
Mohamed Bakkali is not the only one to have mentioned the civil parties. Salah Abdeslam mentioned some of them, like the mother of Romain Feuillade, killed at La Belle team. “I remember Romain’s mother who cried a lot at the helm, it didn’t make me happy to see her”he slipped, saying “to recognize in suffering” some testimonials. He also mentioned, as Sofien Ayari, the mother of Lamia Mondeguer, also killed in front of this bar in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. “I could have been their mother, I imagined them in my hands, little bits of cabbage, innocent, called this woman of Egyptian origin to the stand. It is true that the more you advance in the knowledge of the file, the more these angels turn into monsters, go and find out why.”
“This woman who lost her daughter, the only thing she asks of me is to understand what was going on in my head. I told myself that I owe her that, even if it will not return her daughter to her .”
The accused Sofien Ayaribefore the special assize court of Paris
The parents of Romain Feuillade wonder: “Are these statements authentic?” Nadia Mondeguer’s lawyer, Méhana Mouhou, hopes so: “I think that in all this horror, there is still a bit of humanity.”