During the 77th day of hearing in the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, the special assize court examined this Friday the case of Abdellah Chouaa. One of only three defendants in this extraordinary trial to appear free.
From our special correspondent at the Paris courthouse,
With his black suit, his white shirt and his glasses on his nose, the man who appears at the bar this Friday looks like a computer scientist or salesperson. But to hear the two women who shared his life, Abdellah Chouaa has nothing to do before this assize court.
His cousin, first, to whom he was married for five years until 2013. By videoconference from Brussels, dressed in a white sweater and a long purple veil, she describes a laughing “daddy-hen” to whom she blamed herself just as much for not saying her prayers as for not paying the household bills. A naive gambler who is easily abused, who doesn’t hesitate to get up at 3 a.m. to pick up a friend who has broken down without asking questions.
His new wife, then, who comes to the bar perched on heels, dressed in a black blouse on which long blond hair falls. She talks at length about her meeting in 2016 with “ a brave, smiling, hard-working man, a good guy of her confusion upon learning her story, before finally being convinced of her innocence. She also recounts the violence of the searches in the middle of the night while she is pregnant, the new indictment of her husband in the Parisian file. “Si you think it’s free, but it’s never free. “Since the beginning of the trial, “ I see him one day a week, and that day he has to go shopping to pay for the journeys here, the two rents, I stay alone “.
“He was my friend. Today I want him”
But it is the parenthesis between these two women that the court is interested in: the weeks and months preceding the attacks in Paris and Brussels. to its links with Mohammad Abrinithe friend he accompanied to the airport when he left for Syria, whom he picked up two weeks later on his return to Paris.
Did he know that Abrini was going to Syria? Abdellah Chouaa has often changed his version and the facts do not always help to see things more clearly. On the one hand, he played taxis without visibly asking questions, on the other, suspecting the real destination of the stay, he warned the police, as he had denounced his little brother a year earlier who had also tried , but without success, to join the caliphate. “ I’d rather see him in prison than dead in Syria “, he had then declared to the investigators.
The court also wonders: why did he hide for a long time that he had made the Brussels-Paris round trip alongsideAhmad Dahmani, also passed through Syria and accused of having participated later in the preparations for the attacks? “ I saw the actors in the case on TV, what people were saying about it, I was scared “, he justifies today.
On the deleted videos linked to the Islamic State group found by the investigators on his computer: “ It was Mohamed Abrini watching them for news of his little brother in Syria. And those consulted after the departure of Mohamed Abrini? “ I had a big apartment, there were always people in my house “, he sweeps.
After several hours of hearings, he once again evokes Mohamed Abrini. In the box, he no longer recognizes the generous friend who systematically paid for evening rounds, the partygoer who loved football and girls. ” He was my friend. Today I blame him, it’s because of him that I’m here. At the helm, Abdellah Chouaa cries.
► Read also all the hearings of the trial of the November 13 attacks