The proceedings relate to the worst atrocity carried out in France since World War II. It left 130 dead, hundreds of men and women both physically and mentally wounded and many families in mourning. It is an historic criminal trial in which the resources that have already been deployed give some idea of its sheer scale; 140 days have been set aside for the hearing, there are 542 volumes of evidence and procedure, close to 1,800 people have joined as civil parties to the criminal case, with a total of 330 lawyers involved, while 141 different media from across the world have been given accreditation.
Nearly six years after the terrorist attacks that took place at the Bataclan music hall in Paris, on the capital's streets and at the Stade de France sports stadium at Saint-Denis in the north Parisian suburbs on November 13th 2015, this trial begins at 12.30pm this Wednesday September 8th. After a scheduled nine months of proceedings, the verdict is due to be delivered on May 25th 2022.
But before justice takes place, those attending will have to show their credentials. Because of the ever-present risk of a terrorist attack, the Île de la Cité in the River Seine where the courtroom is located in Paris will be locked down. A security perimeter will surround the Palais de Justice during the hearing, with systematic pat downs and searches for everyone who wants to gain entry. It will be the same level of security for cars; the nearby roads the boulevard du Palais, quai des Orfèvres and quai de l’Horloge will be closed to traffic.
The inside of the court building will be no less extraordinary. The trial will take place in the Palais's concourse where a purpose-built courtroom costing around eight million euros has been built. Measuring 45 metres long and 15 metres wide, it is the largest court building of its type ever built in France, its size needed to accommodate 550 people. Even so, it will not be large enough to welcome all those expected for the trial.
In addition two existing courtrooms will be set aside, one for journalists covering the trial and the other for families of the victims. Once again, these will not be enough. So on top of this there will be ten rooms located around the court buildings where families will be able to watch proceedings via a live link. An eleventh and final room will be set aside for the public. In all, more than 2,000 people will be able to be present at the trial at any one time.
Future generations will also be able to view the proceedings as the trial will be filmed in its entirety for the country's National Archives. This provision has only existed since 1985 and only 12 trials have been filmed in this way. These included the trials of the former Rwandan spy chief Pascal Simbikangwa over the massacres in his country, the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the French wartime collaborators Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier, and that of former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Lyon in eastern France. The last proceedings to be filmed in this was the trial that began in September 2020 over the terror attacks in France that took place in January 2015. For the first time, the current hearing will also be broadcast via web radio – with a slight time delay – for those victims' families who want to listen from their own home.
Another unusual feature is in the composition of the judges. The bench will consist not of five judges as usual - there have been no jury trials for terrorist cases in France since 1986 – but nine judges. The four additional judges will be present at the proceedings so they can replace any of their five colleagues if they have to stand down for any reason. The presiding judge will be Jean-Louis Périès, an experienced judge who has investigated organised crime cases for many years. His deputy will be Frédérique Aline.
The prosecution will be handled by three prosecutors or magistrates from the antiterrorist prosecution unit the Parquet National Antiterroristes (PNAT). Usually there are only two handling a case. One of them, Nicolas Le Bris, was the duty prosecutor in Paris at the time of the attacks in November 2015. Another prosecutor, Camille Hennetier, who at that time was head of the antiterrorist unit at the Paris prosecutor's office, is the number two at the PNAT. The third, Nicolas Braconnay, met the survivors who were taken to the military school, the École Militaire, in the days after the attack where a centre was set up for the victims and their families.
In the courtroom there will also be 30 or so defence lawyers plus a small fraction of the many lawyers – some 300 - representing the victims' families who are part of the joint civil action, who number close to 1,800. Five weeks have been set aside between the end of September and the end of October for the victims to describe from the witness stand what they endured on the night of the attacks and subsequently. Another innovation is that the victims will be given lanyards to wear, red ones for those who not want to talk to journalists as they leave the court building each day and green ones for the rest.
The trial will begin with an examination of the attacks themselves, with expert reports and also the statements of those witnesses present. At the start of November the criminal court will then move on to looking at the people involved and the charges the 20 accused face – six of them will be tried in their absence.
While some grey areas still exist, as Le Monde recently reported, the bulk of the events leading up to and including the attacks have been pieced together, from the initial activity in January 2015 right through to March 2016, when the survivors of the Paris terrorist cell struck in Brussels. Some of the jihadists were very talkative during questioning in the subsequent investigation. It remains to be seen if they will say more during the trial or if they will remain silent in court, with none of them wanting to give the impression they have betrayed the other defendants. But that is not a key issue.
Sometimes the figures themselves reveal the full reality of the case.
Out of the 14 accused who were last year sent to stand trial in relation to the January 2015 terror attacks, only two were charged with being accomplices to murder and thus facing life sentences. Eleven others were accused of a terrorist criminal conspiracy while the last defendant was charged with criminal conspiracy, with potential jail sentences of 20 years or less.
Out of the 20 standing trial this Wednesday for the November 2015 attacks, one is charged with running a terrorist organisation, another (Salah Abdeslam) for murder, and nine for being accessories to murder. Unlike the January 2015 trial – and one taking place in Nice for the 2016 terror attack there – the November 2015 terror attack trial will not just be about the sidekicks.
One particularity of this case is that out of the eleven men who potentially face life imprisonment, five of them are in fact “presumed dead”, having been eliminated in air strikes by the international coalition in Syria, as Mediapart revealed three years ago.
Meanwhile, while some of those who ordered the November 2015 attack have not faced prosecution, it has to be acknowledged – and this is unique in the recent annals of the fight against terrorism – that the chain of command behind the attacks has been pieced together, and the degree of involvement of various individuals has been precisely documented. Inevitably, though, media attention will focus excessively on the figure of Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the ten-man unit that spread death in the streets of the capital and at the Stade de France sports stadium at Saint-Denis.
There will also be much attention focused on the Clain brothers, Fabien and Jean-Michel, who claimed responsibility for the November 13th attacks on behalf of the terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS). Some have wrongly portrayed them as the brains behind the attacks, even though they were 'just' one part of the group in control of communications inside the self-styled IS caliphate. This offence is enough for them to attract a theoretical life sentence – they are among those presumed dead - but not enough to regard them as the people who conceived this mass slaughter.
Conversely, one should certainly not underestimate the role played by other men in charge of the logistics and without whom the attacks would not have been possible. It will be difficult for these men to deny knowledge of the terrorist plan as they had joined, even if only temporarily, the ranks of Islamic State. They were also found later in Europe in the company of the future killers more than two months before November 13th 2015, and four months later they were still with the four suicide attackers who were preparing to attack Brussels.
These include Mohamed Abrini, a childhood friend of Salah Abdeslam who had once lived in an adjoining house to Abdeslam, and Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November attacks who died five days later when police launched an attack on his hideout. Another is Mohamed Bakkali, who in December 2020 was convicted for his part in an attack on a Paris-bound Thalys train in August 2015; he has since appealed and is thus presumed innocent pending the verdict of that appeal.
Salah Abdeslam, the purported suicide attacker who survived for reasons that remain unclear, was not the only would-be assailant who survived the attacks planned by Islamic State. The Algerian Adel Haddadi and Muhammad Usman, who got stranded on a Greek island for three weeks because of their false documentation, were not able to join the rest of the team in time to take part in the November attacks. Belgians Mohamed Abrini and Sofien Ayari, as well as the Swede Osama Krayem, were also suspected of having been earmarked to die; the first in Paris and the other two in attacks in Holland in the autumn of 2015. They were also supposed to have perished in the attacks in Brussels on March 22nd but either pulled out at the last moment or were prevented in some way.
Salah Abdeslam, Mohamed Abrini, Sofien Ayari and Osama Krayem will face trial again in Belgium as part of the proceedings relating to the 2016 attacks in Brussels. That will mark the true judicial end to the story of this terrorist cell, which was the first in the history of jihadist terrorism to have struck on two successive occasions in Europe.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter