Little more than two months after the end of the trial of 20 defendants accused variously of perpetrating or aiding the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks which left 130 people dead, the same purpose-built courtroom in the centre of the French capital reopened on Monday afternoon for the trial of eight defendants accused of involvement in a horrific terrorist attack in the Riviera city of Nice in July 2016, in which 86 people lost their lives.
The trial is scheduled to last three months, with the verdicts due to be delivered on December 16th. There are more than 850 civil parties (plaintiffs), while 109 media from France and around the world are accredited to follow the hearings, all of which will be filmed in their entirety for the French National Archives. The trial will inevitably be unique given the absolute horror of the crime it centres upon.
It was just after 10.30pm on July 14th 2016, minutes after the traditional fireworks display to celebrate Bastille Day had finished, when a 19-tonne truck driven by terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel entered the crowded Promenade des Anglais seafront avenue in Nice and crashed through barriers that had been put up to protect a pedestrian zone created for the evening.
With his truck lights out, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian national and resident of Nice, mounted the pavement where his first victims were crushed under the vehicle’s wheels. He then drove back onto the roadway that had been closed to traffic, zig-zagging left and right as he mowed down pedestrians at high speed along an almost two-kilometre stretch. At the end of the carnage, after police shot dead Bouhlel, 84 people had died, and more than 450 others were injured, many of them seriously, of who two died in the days that followed. It was the second-most murderous attack in post-war France.
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It will be a unique trial both because of the nature of the crime and because of the emotions that will legitimately follow the testimony of the surviving victims and eye witnesses.
But the trial will also likely be a frustrating one for the civil parties, who have waited six years to see justice done, not only because of Bouhlel's absence, but because of the cases against the seven men and one woman who make up the defendants.
In the nine-month trial, which ended in late June, of the 20 people accused of their various roles in the November 13th 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, 11 of them faced life sentences for, variously, “directing a terrorist organisation”, “murders”, and aiding and abetting murders”. In the trial of the eight defendants for their roles in the July 14th 2016 Nice attack, only three are charged with “conspiring with terrorists”, while the five others will answer charges of common law crimes.
Just one of the defendants faces a possible life sentence (a repeat offender), while the others face possible sentences of between five and 20 years behind bars. Five of the eight will appear while on bail, and the three others – one of whom is in preventive detention over a separate criminal case – will be placed under guard in a secure, enclosed dock.
A defendant accused of helping Bouhlel hire a truck not used in the attack
As is often the case in the trials of those accused of involvement in jihadist attacks in which the perpetrators died in the committal of the crimes – in this case, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel died in a firefight with police after his vehicle stalled – it is the ‘small fry’ who appear in court. But in comparison to the several terrorism trials held in France over the past four years, the prosecution case here is unusually weak.
That is not because the investigations were botched, but because Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the terrorist, carried out his horrific crime alone. Concerning the three men charged with conspiring with terrorists, the indictment firstly notes that they were necessarily “entirely aware of the recent adherence of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel to the nihilistic ideology of armed jihad and of his fascination for perpetrating violent acts”. It is then noted that they helped Lahouaiej-Bouhlel both in his search to rent a heavy truck and to acquire weapons.
While the evidence exists concerning help given to him for the purchase of the 7.65 mm automatic pistol he had with him on the night of the attack, that concerning help he received for the rental of the truck is much less convincing; two of the three are accused on the basis of mobile phone text messages sent to them by Bouhlel which suggest that they helped him in trying to rent a truck, but which was not that which he used for the massacre on the night of July 14th.
The most disturbing evidence, but which the judicial investigation was unable to determine the degree of its pertinence, was a text message found in Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s mobile phone. He sent the message, four hours before he launched his attack, to the person who had helped him buy a weapon, and which read: “I wanted to tell you that the pistol you gave me yesterday is very good. Tell your mate […] that he [should] bring us five [others]. Chokri and his friends are ready for next month.” The defendant in question, Chokri Chafroud, has maintained he did not understand the message.
As for the five other defendants, they face sentences ranging from between five and ten years in prison for their alleged close or distant involvement in negotiations that led to Bouhlel obtaining an automatic pistol. Two of them were unable to find the gun he wanted, and tricked him by selling him a false Beretta gun they had acquired from a woman to whom they sold cocaine.
During their initial detention in prison, where they were kept in a special block for suspected radicalised prisoners, the defendants were submitted to evaluations by a multi-disciplinary team of expert assessors. In each case, the experts noted the absence of any “sign of radicalisation or adherence to jihadist Salafism”.
Concerning Chokri Chafroud, the experts reported that “his personality did not indicate any risk of the perpetration of a violent act, of religious proselytization or of slipping into violent radicalisation”.
There was a ninth suspect arrested after the attack, who was accused of having sold for 300 euros the automatic pistol Bouhlel used for his attack, but that sale was to the person who in fact subsequently sold the gun directly to the terrorist. The suspect committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell at Fleury-Mérogis prison, close to Paris, on June 8th 2018. Clearly unable to cope with his conditions behind bars, he had told prison staff ten days earlier that he had been threatened by other inmates who were detained for Islamic terrorism offences, and who regarded him as “a grass”.
The magistrates from the anti-terrorist investigation department who led the judicial probe into the Nice attack proceeded with a degree of hesitation before finally sending the eight for trial. The vice prosecutor who was assigned to following the investigation, and who signed off the magistrates’ order for them to stand trial, will not be present in court.
In the document detailing the charges against the defendants, the magistrates dropped potential charges against three of them for being accomplices to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s murderous crime. It had been “established with certainty”, they wrote, that “the act perpetrated” by Lahouaiej-Bouhlel “did not have a direct co-perpetrator”, adding that their investigation had “in no way brought to light that those concerned had brought effective assistance for the perpetration of the terrorist attack […] , just as it had not established that they had, in the time preceding the terrorist attack, precise knowledge of a terrorist project that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was in the process of preparing, nor of the moment of its perpetration”.
The lawyers for the civil parties to the case, made up of direct and indirect victims, have few illusions about the outcome of the trial. “The victims are going to be frustrated,” commented lawyer Gérard Chemla, who will represent several of them in court. “They run the risk of having the impression that they are not being treated like the others.”
Some of the civil parties, notably those from Nice, expect that full life sentences will be handed down. “We mustn’t mistake ourselves about which trial this is,” said Chemla, who was also the lawyer for a number of civil parties at the November 13th 2015 Paris attacks trial. “It will be about discussing the [level of] guilt of the accused, but the sentences will not be comparable [editor’s note, to the November 2015 attacks trial]. We, the lawyers for the civil parties, have a pedagogic task towards our clients.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse