The trial opened on September 8th of 20 men accused, variously, of perpetrating or helping with the perpetration of the terrorist attacks carried out in Paris on the evening of November 13th, 2015. Claimed by the so-called Islamic State group, the shootings and suicide bombings in and around the capital left a total of 130 people dead and more than four hundred others wounded.
The trial, held in a specially built courtroom at the historic Palais de Justice building on the Île de la Cité in central Paris, is expected to last nine months.
Six of the accused are being tried in their absence; five of them were reportedly killed in the Middle East and another is serving a prison sentence in Turkey, to where he fled immediately after the Paris attacks. A key defendant at the trial is Salah Abdeslam, 31, believed to be the only one among the ten terrorists who carried out the attacks to have survived.
In Parallel with its regular coverage of the proceedings, Mediapart is publishing the accounts of seven direct and indirect victims of the massacres – survivors from the scenes of the attacks and also the relatives of those who died – as they follow the events in court.
Throughout the trial, as the hearings unfold, they will give their first-hand reactions and reflections about the events in court; what they are hoping for, what they have learnt, what they found positive, or have been angered or surprised by. Below are two of the first of those accounts.
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Nadine Ribet-Reinhart, 60, is a doctor with a French public health agency where she works on the organisation of access to healthcare, notably for the elderly and the handicapped.
A mother of three, her eldest child, 26-year-old Valentin, was among the 90 people shot dead by jihadist terrorists at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris during the evening of November 13th 2015. Over the past five years, she has saved up holiday leave in order to use it to attend the trial of the 20 accused. She told Mediapart that she had no idea of how she would live through the trial, which she said she dearly hoped the media would stop presenting as “the trial of the century”. This is her first contribution:
"Five years, ten months and one day after November 13th 2015, I took my first steps towards the Palais de Justice, with a new title for my CV: “civil party”, as a “bereaved parent”, the mother of a victim at the Bataclan. It was September 14th and, at 12.30pm, I made the journey by metro, using line number 9. That’s the one that runs to the Mairie de Montreuil at one end, and the Pont de Sèvres at the other.
Taking this metro line is to be, already, back in the attacks. The Oberkampf station is 100 metres from the Bataclan. The station is also of course that which serves the rue Oberkampf, where several buildings were used as advanced medical posts and which allowed to bring help to the numerous wounded that night. I later learned also that it became a temporary morgue for five victims, fatally struck by the bullets of the Kalashnikovs.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
I made the bad choice upon arriving at the Cité metro station, being certain that I had arrived close to the entrance reserved for the ‘happy few’, alias the civil parties.
I was politely and firmly turned back. I began wandering around the Palais de Justice before it was explained to me which path to take. Suddenly, I was gripped by a panic attack. I could no longer breath, I could no longer walk. After a phone call for help, a young woman from the association ‘Paris Aide aux victimes’ was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps to the palais (thanks).
I could no longer see anything, I could no longer hear anything, I no longer understood anything. All I then want is to be inside the courtroom and to listen to Ms Panou, the Belgian magistrate in charge of the investigation [editor’s note, Judge Isabelle Panou, who led investigations notably into the background of the terrorists, most of who were based in Belgium].
One more effort. At the security check I have to empty my bag – my computer, phones and my stack of pens which intrigue the security services… I’ll save you the colossal falling over despite the sign, “Be careful of the step”, that was clearly marked.
There it is, the portrait of a civil party arriving at the trial for the first time: all bearings have disappeared, the patiently constructed defence mechanisms have collapsed, and it is a helpless person who arrives in the courtroom. Despite the warm and kindly welcome from the friends from the ‘13onze15’ association.
Little by little, I entered the implacable account given by Judge Panou, who described the incredible, deadly and tentacular organisation put in place with one single aim: to kill, kill and kill that evening of Friday, November 13th. Throughout the afternoon, the spider’s web was outlined, spinning threads of links across Europe in order to bring back the killers from Syria.
With one point of departure, the district of Molenbeek, a Brussels neighbourhood where people like you and me rub shoulders, but where also do radicalised people who will descend into terrorism. Molenbeek and its mysteries, which Ms Panou cannot summarise, despite her understanding of this small locality, all the nooks and crannies of which she has known since investigating cases of terrorism as of 2003.
And me, since November 2015, I ask myself: how could the jihadist gangrene have been left to invade this neighbourhood? Where were, or where are, the connivances? What were the levers that allowed this matter to fertilise minds and encourage the departures for Syria? Who knew? The parents? Friends? Employers? The police? The town hall?
Listening to Judge Panou, familiar names return to my ears, notably that of the recruiter, Khalid Zerkani, alias “Father Christmas”, who knew how to draw all these young men into his net.
It is the chronicle of a future disaster before which impotence and connivance were stronger than police investigations. To a backdrop of indifference, the cousins, brothers, childhood friends came together with the will to, one day, kill. They don’t yet know when, but the day will come.
We are there, listening from the so very uncomfortable benches. Frozen, because we know the ending, or at least a part of the ending. For me, it was the mortuary.
This first day of the hearings sends me back to the day of January 23rd 2016, at the Paris bar offices [for a meeting] organised by the National Federation of Victims of Terrorist Attacks and Collective Accidents (the FENVAC). That day, much time was given over to the question of the trial that would one day be held. Lawyers [Frédéric] Bibal and [Gérard] Chemla warned us against what we would endure, but were we in a position to understand their words, such as it was that we were occupied by our pain (grief, physical pain among the wounded, trauma shock, and sometimes all three at once)?
We’re there now.
The time of the trial has come, and we’re going to be given nine months."
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Georges Salines, 64, is a retired doctor who worked (like Nadine Ribet-Reinhart, with whom he is unrelated, continues to) for a public health agency, where he was specialised in environmental issues. The married father-of-three also lost a child, his daughter Lola, 28, in the shooting massacre at the Bataclan concert hall on November 13th 2015.
In January 2016, two months after the terrorist attacks, he and other victims created an association called ‘13onze15:Fraternité et Vérité’ (13eleven15: Fraternity and Truth) which he presided until September 2017, and which he is now honorary president of. In January 2020 he published a book of conversations with Azdyne Amimour, the father of Samy Amimour, one of the terrorist gunmen who attacked the Bataclan. The book, entitled ‘Il nous reste les mots’ (roughly translatable as, ‘Words are what remain for us’) followed an initial contact between the two in 2018. They have engaged together on a campaign to combat the radicalisation that leads to joining the jihadist movement, and Georges Salines has regularly been invited by secondary schools to speak to pupils about the subject.
In this second contribution to the chronicles of the ongoing trial that he and six other direct and indirect victims of the attacks are compiling for Mediapart, he explains how he deliberately missed the opening of the hearings, but why he now attends them almost every day.
"Like a recalcitrant schoolboy dunce, I missed the post-summer rentrée. I wanted to prolong the long holiday. The week the trial opened, I left for Spain. I could have gone elsewhere, anywhere as long as it was far from the Île de la Cité. I wanted to escape from the news reports, the documentaries, the interviews, and above all the journalists who insisted on adding my voice to the ambient cacophony.
It was a partly successful mission: I was able, without lying or giving further explanations, to tell everyone, even those who I like, that I was unavailable.
It was also a partly failed mission: the means of modern communication being what they are, I couldn’t avoid the raining messages from parents, friends, and acquaintances who assured me of their support during these difficult times. Pleasant, of course, but also a little heavy. Rather than sensing my mobile phone vibrating and having to send “Thanks!”, I would have preferred to forget the trial for a few days more, the jihad, the pain, and concentrate myself on the flight of vultures above the Peaks of Europe, the swell breaking at the foot of the Santander lighthouse, the sun reflecting on the surfaces of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the tentacle of the octopus on my plate.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The very structured precision of the account of the five years of investigations given by “SDAT 99” [the anonymous codename given to a testifying officer from the anti-terrorist services] on September 13th allowed me to (re) visit the cathedral of objective facts which constitutes the case file. The more impressionistic testimony given the following day by the Belgian judge, Ms Panou, led me into the privacy of the interrogations, the hesitations of the investigating magistrates, the backgrounds of the accused. Her voice, like that, later in the week, of Patrick, an officer with the [police] criminal brigade who came to present the observations made at the Bataclan, left little doubt about the authentic emotion felt by these professionals when they recount the events of six years ago.
How were the terrorists able to massacre their fellow people with such an apparent casualness? They were all young. None were under the influence of a psychoactive substance (contrary to some fibs that were widely circulated). Some had no violent past before joining, just a few months before the attacks, the Islamic State.
If that remains a mystery for me, one clarification came concerning the 14 of the accused who were present [editor’s note, six of the total 20 accused are being tried in their absence] when, at the opening of the hearing on September 15th, the presiding judge allowed them to address the court. Of course, no-one knows if what they said corresponds with what they did, or what they really think, but at least it is what they wanted to tell us at that moment. But the ones and the others said very different things.
On the subject of the accusations against them, some claimed their innocence, more (Yassine Atar: “I proclaimed my innocence since the very first day”) or less strongly (Muhammad Usman: “I don’t know why I’m here”). Others have already recognised (at least in part) their guilt, but some among them (Hamza Attou, Farid Kharkhach, Mohamed Amri) deny having known known about a terrorist project, or try to minimise their role (Mohamed Abrini).
Concerning the issue of their moral or political position, several denounced the attacks, and there, also, more or less strongly. Yassine Atar was again the most vehement – “I condemn these atrocities with the utmost firmness”. Some expressed regrets (Adel Haddadi: “I committed mistakes. I’m doing everything to correct them.”). Others (Abdellah Chouaa, Muhammad Usman, Yassine Atar) spoke of compassion towards the victims.
As for Salah Abdeslam, he gave a quite long and structured statement in which he essentially said two things. Firstly, he refutes the terms “terrorism” and “radical jihadism”. According to him, “there is only authentic Islam”, “these radicals are Muslims”. Secondly, he justifies the massacre as being a reprisal for French military actions: “We targeted the civilian population but, in reality, we have nothing personal against those people. We targeted France, and nothing else […] we wanted France to suffer the same pain as that which we suffer.”
Most commentators were, or pretended to be, shocked by the second point. Of course, there was the “we have nothing personal” which can make one’s blood boil over its morally abject character, but it is the usual rhetoric of the Islamic state. Moreover, [Mediapart journalist] Matthieu Suc has demonstrated the falseness of this here, because the project for the attacks against France began to be planned before any intervention was made by our [armed] forces. Which does not necessarily mean, however, that Salah Abdeslam or the other members of the group did not themselves believe in the lies of their emirs.
The first point was often given a lot less attention. Certainly, it also has nothing original about it: this manner of deciding who is Muslim and who isn’t is widespread in radical Islam. It allows for the justification of the massacres of co-religionists and even has a name: takfirism. But this term is doubly odious for the immense majority of Muslims. It excommunicates them, all the while exposing them to the hatred of Islamophobes because a line of sameness is traced between authentic Islam and violent radicalism, reinforcing the worst prejudices.
Also given little attention was the fact that three of the accused said nothing, although two of them said they would express themselves later on. This silence (which had for a long while previously characterised the behaviour of Salah Abdeslam) concerns two people suspected of having been involved at a senior level in the terrorist cell (Osama Krayem and Sofien Ayari).
Many things have been heard through the court microphones, and shown on the screens, during the first days of the trial. But I also discovered another reason to follow the path each day to the court. It is the place where I meet with my friends – victims, and also certain lawyers, journalists, members of associations, psychologists. Before the hearings, or during the pauses or at the end of the day, we can share our impressions, our reflections and our emotions. And even during the hearings, in the courtroom where we listen in silence, I sense the proximity of people I like, and I benefit from their mute support. Curiously, this ancient stone court building into which an ultra-modern courtroom in light-coloured wood has been installed, like a Russian doll, transforms itself into a warm place, almost a place of socialization.
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- The original French texts of the above accounts by Nadine Ribet-Reinhart and by Georges Salines for Mediapart can be found, respectively, here and here.
English versions by Graham Tearse