“It’s not easy to go to the end, after all these destroyed lives, all this pain.” Jean-Claude Hubler, the president of the association Life for Nice, is one of the last civil parties to speak, Friday, October 21, after five weeks of testimony at the trial of the Nice attack. In total, 300 people, out of more than 2,000 civil parties, tried to put words to the horror of July 14, 2016.
Some were present on the Promenade des Anglais the evening of the attack and were injured or traumatized. Others have lost one or more loved ones, sometimes an entire family. Cindy Pellegrini has lost six members of her family. “My step-dad’s parents, my grandma, my grandpa, my mom and my little brother”she listed between sobs, Thursday, facing the special assize court.
Aboard a 19-tonne truck, terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed 86 people that evening, including 15 children and teenagers. Among them, Laura Borla, killed at 13 and a half. Her twin, Audrey, came to tell at the end of September, from the height of her 20 years, how much she had “hard to move on” without the one who was his “mirror”, “half of [sa] life”.
The large number of minor victims is one of the peculiarities of this attack, which targeted families, who came in large numbers to watch the fireworks. Some have miraculously survived, like Hager Ben Aouissi, passed under the wheels of the truck with her 4-year-old daughter. She recounted to the court the reminiscences which provoke violent attacks of anxiety in the child, as in many other victims.
Soad and her little sister Emma, 15 and 12 at the time, told the stand, shaken by grief, how they saw “great form” come upon them. Then they described the general panic, the blood, the screams. Arrived on the Promenade with their maternal grandmother, their aunt and her husband, they are the only ones to have survived.
“In thirty years at the bar, I had never seen so much suffering”, observes Méhana Mouhou, lawyer for several civil parties. “The victims came to tell the unspeakable: a crime scene over two kilometers, shattered, dislocated bodies, the smell of blood”he underlines, emphasizing the “unimaginable damage caused by the truck”.
Benjamin Ollié, a young lawyer from Nice, also came out shaken from the hearing. “You have to cash in, it’s not easy. For the magistrates too, it must be complicated”, this council, which represents around forty civil parties, modestly slips in. This phase of testimonies, although repetitive, is essential in his eyes. “The president said it himself: the fact of hearing the victims allowed him to put the human in a file of instruction of 9,700 ratings.”
This feeling is shared by Samia Maktouf. The lawyer wants to pay tribute to the “Courage of the civil parties, who have done violence to come”, noting that many have decided “at the last moment”, when others preferred “withdraw”. It remains particularly marked by the dissemination of amateur and municipal videos of the massacre. “I saw these images three times. The violence is the same each time. You don’t get used to it”, she is indignant, welcoming the choice of the president to have agreed to broadcast them – the advisability of showing them or not had been debated. “A court of assizes must judge the facts. It offends, but it should not be watered down”, insists the lawyer.
On the benches of the civil parties, her colleague Olivia Chalus-Pénochet confides “not sleeping for several days”, haunted by the stories of her clients. She says she is relieved to attack the merits of the case on Monday, with the hearings of the relatives of the terrorist, killed by the police on the evening of the attack, before the personality interrogation of the accused the following week. But she does not hide her disappointment with the answers provided so far on the security aspect of the trial.
As such, the hearing of Christian Estrosi, heard as a witness on Thursday, greatly disappointed the civil parties. He was particularly expected on the issue of the security system put in place at the time. Were there any flaws? Would the installation of concrete studs on the promenade have saved lives? How was Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel able to carry out ten scoutings on the Promenade des Anglais with a 19-tonne truck without being worried? These questions have not ceased to return in recent weeks in the mouths of the victims. Questioned by the court and the lawyers for the civil parties, the mayor of Nice – who at the time was the first deputy of the municipality in charge of security – declared that he had “follow state instructions to the letter”ensuring “that no threat had been identified”.
His answers did not convince. Another procedure, under investigation since 2017, is still in progress on this issue, but seems “to the point of death”regrets Jean-Claude Hubler. “The will of the Nice prosecutor’s office is to go to the end of the investigations”, prosecutor Xavier Bonhomme recently said. Pending another possible trial at the end of this parallel investigation, it is indeed the eight defendants in this trial who will have to be judged.