At the end of the longest-ever trial France, a panel of five judges on Wednesday announced their verdicts and the sentencing of 20 men accused, variously, of perpetrating or helping to perpetrate the Islamic State group’s terrorist attacks in and around Paris on the evening of November 13th 2015 which left 130 people dead and more than 400 wounded.
The death toll has since risen, after the suicides of two survivors of the attacks, including one who took their life during the trial, which included often harrowing evidence and testimony, that began on September 8th.
Six of the accused were tried in their absence, one of them imprisoned in Turkey while the other five are presumed, but not confirmed, to have died in the Syria-Iraq war zone.
The 14 defendants present during the almost ten months of hearings, held in a specially built courtroom in the historic Palais de Justice building in central Paris, all appeared grim-faced during the sentencing on Wednesday evening by the trial’s presiding magistrate Jean-Louis Périès.
The magistrates handed the principal defendant, Salah Abdeslam, 32, a full life sentence. Abdeslam, a French national raised in the Belgian capital Brussels, is the only survivor among the ten-member Islamic State (IS) group cell which carried out the shootings and suicide bombings, the others having variously blown themselves up or were shot dead by police.
Handed the severest sentence allowed under French law, and which has previously been applied on just four occasions, Abdeslam has no possibility of parole before he has served a minimum of 30 years behind bars.
During the trial, Abdeslam had claimed he had decided not to ignite his suicide vest at a Paris bar on the night of November 13th. The judges dismissed the claim, deciding that he would have detonated the device had it not proved defective.
All but one of the 20 accused, whose trial began last September, were found guilty of terrorist activity as charged, and were handed sentences of between two years and life in prison. Some were charged with providing logistical support for the attacks, others with more direct involvement.
Present at the trial, Mohamed Abrini, 37, a Belgian national and a childhood friend of Abdeslam, who were both raised in a district of Brussels by families of Moroccan descent, was found guilty of aiding the Paris attacks, notably by helping transport the IS cell and its arms to Paris. Abrini was also sentenced to life imprisonment, but with a minimum term of 22 years.
Abrini, who admitted being initially intended by IS to take part in the November 13th Paris attacks, backed out and fled back to Brussels on the previous night. He is due to stand trial later this year for his admitted involvement in an IS suicide bombing attack at Brussels airport in March 2016, part of a double-pronged IS attack that day at the airport and on the Brussels metro, which together claimed the lives of 32 people.
Life sentences were pronounced by the magistrates on Wednesday against five of those tried in absentia and who were judged to be the commanders behind the IS attacks in Paris.
Two other defendants found guilty of significant logistical help for the attacks, who were finally arrested in Austria, were handed down sentences of 18 years in prison, with a minimum term of 12 years before parole may be considered.
Three others found guilty of less important logistical aid for the attacks, were handed suspended jail sentences of between five and four years.
The one defendant who was not found guilty of terrorist charges was Farid Kharkhach, who was sentenced to two years in jail for criminal conspiracy for delivering false identity papers to the terrorists, whose intentions the judges decided he was not necessarily aware of.
Before the trial began last year, seven direct and indirect victims of the November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris agreed to write for Mediapart first-hand accounts of their emotions and reactions as the hearings unfolded. They include survivors of the attacks and family members of those who died.
One of them is Georges Salines, whose daughter Lola was among the 90 people murdered in the shooting massacre at the Bataclan concert hall that November evening. In his latest contribution, written earlier this week, shortly before the sentences were announced on Wednesday, and which is translated into English below, he questions the sense behind severe jail sentences, and notably that, widely expected, of Salah Abdeslam.
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Georges Salines, 65, is a retired doctor who worked for French a public health agency, where he was specialised in environmental issues. The married father-of-three lost 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. They joined together in a campaign to combat the radicalisation that leads to jihadism, and Georges Salines has regularly been invited by secondary schools to speak to pupils about the subject.
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Georges Salines: “I am writing these lines while the judges deliberate. As you read them, you will perhaps already know the verdicts, but no matter – this is not about commenting on the court’s decisions. I simply wish to say that it is impossible for me not to feel concerned about the fate that will fall on each of the accused, and to try and explain why.
I must underline: I am writing here in a personal capacity, and there is no intention at all to order, or even invite, others to imitate me. During their statements to the court, several civil parties [plaintiffs] said that they would be uninterested in the sentences, that once the trial was over they wished that the accused would disappear from memory, that even their names be forgotten. I understand that.
I understand, but I cannot feel the same.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Yet it is the court that decides, not me. The verdicts will be delivered in the name of the French people and not in the names of the victims. Why should I feel concerned? Well, first of all I am also one of the French people, and the conditions in which justice is done concerns me as a citizen. Well before the V13 [editor’s note, an acronym for Friday 13th] trial, I felt indignant about the bad conditions in prisons. It so happens that my profession led me to visit several prisons and I therefor know what an exercise yard looks like, what an overcrowded cell and the ‘solitary’ confinement conditions of a jail look like. I know how often showers are allowed, and what can happen there. I heard the noise and smelled the odours. Well before having ever heard of Salah Abdeslam, I knew that strict solitary isolation could be a form of torture and lead to madness.
I had positions of principal, founded on knowledge and values. The November 13th 2015 attacks did not drive me to abandon them. I was against the headlong rush towards introducing longer and longer minimum jail terms, increasingly without possibility of parole. I still am. I consider it to be an ideological travesty, cruel and useless, which, moreover, represents a singular lack of confidence in the authorities in charge of overseeing the application of sentencing; to be ‘releasable’ does not mean released. When Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986, following two years in preventive detention, this spiral had not yet begun. Abdallah is ‘releasable’ since 1999, but he is still in [a French] jail, where he has spent 36 years.
What would be signified by handing Abdeslam a full-life prison term, which could only be reconsidered after 30 years, other than to affirm that one abandons the idea of any possibility of remorse, of making amends, of redemption? A possibility about which the reality and sincerity must be decided by a judicial authority before any parole can take effect.
But this trial is not any old trial, it is that of men accused of having participated, contributed, collaborated and helped in events that stole my daughter’s life. I am one of the civil parties. I testified at the stand. My lawyer spoke in my name.
The judges now deliberating heard all of that. A part, but no doubt very small, of their decisions will be influenced by what I was able to say. A connection was made, as Salah Abdeslam said one day, with this very particular art that is his for saying things that are not necessarily false but which are disqualified by the simple fact that they emanate from his mouth.
Furthermore, for ten months I have ‘frequented’ the accused, that is, the 14 present in court. Before [the trial opened on] September 8th, I had learnt what they were accused of from the charge sheets, from articles, from books, but I must admit that I had quite some difficulty in memorising that mass of information. I was not always able to distinguish each of the individuals who played a role in this sinister story. It seemed to me that the ‘cell’ was made up of more people than appear in War and Peace, with names that were more difficult to remember. And it didn’t help that the magistrates write in a style that is markedly more arid than that of Tolstoy.
Today, I have the impression of knowing them better than even some members of my family; I know their names, what they look like, where they were born, where they grew up, who were their parents, what grades they got at school, how much they drank, how much they smoked, whether or not they have a driving licence, if they drove too fast, and which cafés they visited. I know their love lives, the number of marriages they had, and that of their children. I know how they express themselves, if they have a sense of humour, whether they are endearing or exasperating, or the two together. I know what they are accused of, what they admit to having done, what they deny having done, and what I believe probably happened.
In short, I knew they were human beings, but that theoretical certainty has transformed into a sensitive acquaintance, and that changes my viewpoint. I even talked from time to time with the three defendants who were not in detention, and in a certain manner I share their fears and hopes: Hamza Attou and Ali Oulkadi committed indisputable faults and deserved punishment. Abdellah Chouaa insists he is innocent, and the prosecution case was unable to convince me of his guilt.
Hamza Attou is a very young man. Abdellah Chouaa and Ali Oulkadi are fathers. It seems to me that they have already been sufficiently punished for what they did and to send them to prison would represent a further waste in a story that has already wrecked too many lives. I have of course not spoken with any of the other accused, those in the dock, but their fate is of no more indifference to me, and I have, deep down inside, formed an opinion about what the court’s decision should be (‘should’ in the sense of a wish, and not a prediction).
When the verdicts will be pronounced, when they will become definitive after a probable second trial on appeal, and after the eventual exhaustion of all the [legal] recourses, I will renew my request to participate in a restorative legal move by meeting at least one of the accused. I will do it for myself, because I have things to say to them and I would like to listen to them outside of [the framework of] a criminal trial. But I will do it also for them, to help them to reflect, if they want to, about what they did and what they can do in the future; for a hope will remain, in the current state of our law, whatever the court’s decision may be.”
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- The original French version of this text by Georges Salines can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse