At the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, the floor is now up to the prosecution. The representatives of the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office have three days to convince the Court of the reality of the charges against the 14 defendants present and the six absent from this sprawling file.
From our special correspondent at the Paris courthouse,
” This trial was said to be extraordinary, historic. Yes, but above all a normal trial for facts that are not “says Camille Hennetier who introduces these three days of demonstration. The Advocate General will remember the many stories of the victims, and “ the horror of raw facts and crime scenes in the heart of Paris “. Scenes that she knows only too well: the night of November 13, 2015, then responsible for the anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor’s office, she entered the Bataclan. “ Extraordinary drama, extraordinary investigation, detailed, meticulous “, she defends while the flaws in the instruction have been regularly denounced by the defense during these nine months of trial.
Nicolas Braconnay succeeds him. “ We have neither the ambition nor the means to pose as sociologists, political scientists, theologians and even less historians of our own time. “, reassures the Advocate General. But he is keen to name the ideology that connects the 33 identified members of the terrorist cell. “ What brings together a 33-year-old Iraqi, a bird breeder from the Algiers region, young Belgians or French people from Strasbourg, MolenbeekDrancy, two delinquent brothers ? The ideology that concerns us is clearly identified : it is jihadist Islamism. »
No question for the prosecution to erase the religious dimension of this file, no question either of making amalgams between Islam, Islamism and jihadism. The Advocate General concludes this introduction with this formula: This trial is not that of jihadism in general, but that of terrorist criminals in particular “.
The Advocates General return to the profiles of terrorists
If the 14 defendants present and their lawyers hoped to have influenced the convictions of the prosecution, they will be disappointed. The three Advocates General follow each other to review each one. Yassine Atarfor example, whom his uncle had described as ” the spiritual son of Bacchus, god of vice and sex “preferring” scour the brothels of Tangier to frequenting mosques. The Advocate General sees it rather ” the spiritual son of Tartuffe “. He lists the many messages that attest to Yassine Atar’s interest in a rigorous Islam, to the admiration he always had for his brother Osama, the future sponsor of the attacks, even after the latter’s departure for Syria. The Syria where Mohamed Abrini went not to pray at his brother’s grave, but to fight there », Asserts Nicolas Le Bris, SMS in support.
The Advocates General, it is their role, dive back into the smallest details of the file. All the accused go through it: Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commandos, whom the prosecution says is convinced that he knew, contrary to what he claims, that he knew from the summer of 2015 that attacks were being prepared . ” Salah Abdeslam tries to make us believe and to make you believe that he has given up on his departure for Syria for a humanitarian mission. Let’s be clear, we don’t believe it for a moment. »
►Also read: Infographic – November 13 trial: who are the alleged perpetrators and accomplices of the attacks?