It is an intriguing duo who has been appearing for two days before the special assize court in Paris. Personality, biography, way of speaking and even defense strategy: everything seems to oppose Clément Baur, 29, and Mahiedine Merabet, 35, who have been on trial since Thursday January 5 for a project of foiled attack on the eve of the 2017 presidential election.
The two men met in early 2015, in prison. Two years later, on April 18, 2017, the police arrested them in an apartment in Marseille, in which they discovered 3.5 kg of explosives and four firearms. The target of this planned attack could not be established with certainty; this question will be examined during the discussions on the merits. But, before coming to the facts, the court looked for two days on the personality of the two defendants, in order to understand the springs of their headlong rush.
With his ironed white shirt, his black-rimmed glasses, his neatly trimmed beard, his bombastic vocabulary and his airs of an overly polite notary, Mahiedine Merabet opened the sequence on Thursday. As an opening statement, he read a speech: “Please excuse me in advance for any speech impediments. Having for my part a lot of difficulties to externalize my thoughts in public, especially in solemn places like this, I decided to use writing to free my thoughts from the yoke of emotion…”
breaking defense
The register of these first words surprises the audience. The accused continues, regularly glancing around the room to measure its effects: “I have no confidence in my country’s justice system when it comes to issues of politics and war. How to qualify an institution that belongs to a power that is waging a total war against an enemy on the military, informational and semantic level, if not political justice? I consider myself a de facto Muslim political prisoner. »
After having posed the framework of his defense of rupture, Mahiedine Merabet refuses to answer the questions of the court on his biography. The portrait drawn up at the bar by the expert psychiatrist perhaps sheds light on his posture: “He has relative self-confidence, but overstated self-esteem. He is preoccupied with his importance and wants to be the center of attention. He is in a headlong rush: when he is in difficulty, he puts himself in even more difficulty…”
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