The trial continued this week of Abdelkader Merah and Fettah Malki, both accused of complicity in the crimes of Mohamed Merah, the jihadi brother of Abdelkader Merah who murdered seven people in and around the city of Toulouse, southern France, in March 2012.
The victims of Merah’s nine-day killing spree were three soldiers of North African origin and three young Jewish children and a rabbi who were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Merah, 23, who was identified as the perpetrator only after the shootings carried out between March 11th and 19th, was eventually killed when police stormed his hideout in Toulouse on March 22nd.
Because all judicial proceedings against Mohamed Merah ended with his death – and therefore his guilt has never been proven in a court of law – his brother Abdelkader Merah and Fettah Malki represent the first and principal surviving suspects in the massacres to have been brought to trial.
On Wednesday, the eighth day of the trial at a Paris special criminal court, heard from witnesses who survived Merah’s attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse early in the morning on March 19th 2012.
It was shortly after 11am when Dovan Mimouni, who was a young teenager at the time of the events, was called to the witness box. He stopped briefly on his way to the stand, turning around to fetch a pack of paper handkerchiefs from the bench where the civil parties to the case, including the families of the murdered soldiers and the victims of the Ozar Hatorah massacre, were seated. Dovan Mimouni knew that what he was about to recount would be an ordeal.
The witnesses heard on Wednesday, each in their own manner, painted an equally poignant and shocking picture of the scenes that morning five years ago. Until that moment in the trial, which opened on October 2nd, the hearings had been marked by eruptions of abusive language and rude remarks. But on Wednesday everyone – the civil parties, their lawyers, the defendants and their lawyers, and the prosecution – were stunned into silence by the accounts of the massacre.
Dovan Mimouni, aged 15 at the time, was, as usual, the first of the boarders at the school to rise. The headmaster, Yaakov Monsonégo, asked him to look after his daughter Myriam. “He placed his daughter’s hand in mine,” recalled Mimouni, who began choking on his words. “He said to me, ‘take the little one, take her to the front [Editor’s note: of the school]’. I replied, ‘No problem, I’ll take her with me’.”
Myriam’s nanny had been held up, and while waiting for her to arrive at the green school gates to take over care of the child, Mimouni bade time with her and two other pupils. Near to them was Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, who was with his two sons, three-year-old Gabriel and Arié, who was aged five. It was 7.57am, and the school’s educational director was chiding the pupils hanging around the gate for not going for morning prayers. Suddenly, Dovan Mimouni heard what he thought were “fireworks”, but looking up saw nothing.
Meanwhile, André Schroun was walking along the rue Jules-Dalou on which the school sits, taking his three children, aged 3, 10 and 12 to their classes when he heard “sounds of fire crackers”.
Alain Morizur, 71, a retired teacher at an agricultural college, had just arrived at an apartment in a building situated opposite the school to babysit his two-year-old grandson. Morizur’s daughter, who had just left for work, suddenly climbed back up to the apartment to warn him: “There’s a guy who’s shooting off everywhere.”
Immediately before, a man dressed in black and wearing a white helmet had arrived at the school entrance on a powerful scooter. Pulling out a submachine gun, he began firing at the school. “I saw him, he was four or five metres away from me,” Mimouni told the court. “I was petrified. I didn’t know what to do.”
After the first burst of fire, the killer swapped his machinegun for an automatic handgun. Sheltered in his daughter’s apartment, Alain Morizur watched the unfolding events. “It’s not that I’m curious,” he said at the stand. “Simply, one is dumfounded. I remained like a stone beside the window.” Sticking out his arm, his hand opened wide, he mimed the gesture of a man he described as “a gentleman with a black hat, a beard, protecting the people on the ground”. The man he saw was Jonathan Sandler, who was trying to protect his son Arié.
About 50 metres away from his targets, the gunman opened fire on Sandler and his son, wounding both. “I wasn’t born to see things like that,” uttered Morizur before the court.
The gunman then stopped to pick up the machinegun he had seconds earlier put to one side. The schoolchildren seized the moment to run inside the school grounds. But the killer followed them, holding his weapon in his gloved right hand, firing off more rounds. “He showered the school yard,” recounted André Schroun, who had taken refuge in his car. Dovan Mimouni, meanwhile, suddenly realized as he was running that, amid the fury of the events, he had forgotten the headmaster’s daughter Myriam. He told the court how, turning around: “I shouted to her ‘Myriam, run! Run!’ She ran then she turned back, she had forgotten her bag, she tried to get it back. She fell.”
The gunman’s fire had hit her for a first time, along with a teenager, Brian Bijaoui. He continued on his murderous path, this time targeting three-year-old Gabriel Sandler, who fell to the ground after being hit close to a school gate. The gunman reached the infant and shot him dead before turning back to towards Myriam who, wrapped in “a floral anorak”, lay on the ground beside her pink satchel. Alain Morizur described how he saw “this gentleman take hold of the kiddy by the hair and fired into her head at virtually point-blank range”, adding: “I told the police that I’d had the impression that it was a gentleman who had come to work, to do his job.”
The gunman’s dirty work was not over. He left the grounds of the Ozar Hatorah while, just outside, Jonathan Sandler tried to pick himself up from the ground. He was shot dead. His five-year-old son Arié, wounded earlier, tried to escape by crawling on his hands and feet, but was shot dead with two bullets to the head. “I saw him kill Mr Sandler and his sons,” recounted André Schroun, whose daughter was in the same class as one of the Sandler brothers. He had hidden some of the schoolchildren in the backseat and the boot of his car. While giving his testimony André Schroun’s voice was neutral, giving away no apparent emotion, but he succeeded, with restrained language, in expressing the unspeakable. From the witness stand, wearing a dark-coloured suit and a white shirt, his complexion pale under short-cropped and greying hair, Schroun continued: “I saw him finish them off like dogs. He finished his job. The bodies were jumping with the impact of the bullets. He was relentless.”
When the gunman got back on his scooter to flee the scene, just 21 seconds had passed since the shooting began.
Dovan Mimouni came out of the building where he had taken refuge and went to find Myriam. “She was face down on the ground in a pool of blood,” he told the court. “I took her in my arms, I turned around her face to see if she was still there.” Myriam was still alive, but only for a matter of seconds. Mimouni then broke down in tears in the witness box: “At the time I was 15-years-old, I was a child, alright? I didn’t know how to give a heart massage, nothing.”
Like others, he called the emergency services. “We called them 50 times, we saturated them,” he continued. “They couldn’t take the calls. We had the impression that nobody was going to come to help us.”
Fearing that the gunman was going to commit further massacres, André Schroun alerted both the police and other schools. When the emergency services arrived, Alain Morizur took his grandson down to a yard behind his daughter’s apartment block to play football so that he would stop gazing out at the scene of the killings and now the to and fro of police cars and ambulances in front of the school.
André Schroun told how his own children “saw everything”. Following that day, his daughter, then aged three, was no longer able to sleep alone in her room. The family moved house and his children are now at a non-religious school, but the trauma of the events continues to haunt them all. “It destroyed my family,” he said. “We ask ourselves questions every day. Why? Why? Because we’re Jewish?”
Tony Oldak was one of the children who André Schroun hid in his car. Less expressive than other witnesses, he told the court how he is now scared by the sound of fireworks and by the sight of a scooter.
A psychologist who testified before the court via a video link gave details about the problems that afflict Brian Bijaoui, a young teenager in March 2012, who suffered bullet wounds to the chest when the gunman shot at him and Myriam Monsonégo. The psychologist said he suffered from “intrusive images” whenever he sees a white helmet like that of the gunman, and how he has the impression of being “dispossessed of his earlier life”. Bijaoui, she said, had recounted to her that, “I have changed lives, my physique and mentality”. Bijaoui, who is one of the civil parties to the ongoing trial, had refused to take the stand and was not present in court on Wednesday. His lawyer, Ariel Goldmann, told the court: “We held hours of meetings to explain to him that it was in his interest, in the interest of the trial, but it was literally beyond his strength to speak about it, even by video link.”
Immediately after the massacre, Dovan Mimouni went to live in the city of Lyon, about 350 kilometres away, but returned to Toulouse just three days later to be with the other survivors “rather than remain alone”. Subsequently, he spent two more years at the Ozar Hatorah school. He left the witness stand in tears, but without having opened the pack of paper handkerchiefs. His entourage embraced him, tapping his back. According to journalist Sophie Parmentier from France Inter radio station who was also present in court, a brother of French army parachutist Imad Ibn-Ziaten, the first Muslim soldier shot dead by the gunman on March 11th 2012, eight days before the attack on the Jewish school, also took Dovan Mimouni in his arms after his testimony.
The harrowing accounts of the witnesses left some of those on the benches reserved for the press sniffing back sobs, while the magistrates and lawyers kept their heads bowed.
Dovan Mimouni ended his testimony by recounting how, immediately after the gunman escaped, the bodies of the murdered children – Myriam Monsonégo, Arié and Gabriel Sandler – were placed inside the school’s synagogue. Beside their corpses, the survivors waited for the police and emergency services to arrive. “The people were crying,” he said, and drawing his account of the events to a close, added. “That’s all.”
-------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse