It is extremely rare to see an investigating judge come to testify at the bar on her work which served as the basis for the current trial. This is the exercise to which the magistrate Nathalie Poux complied for three hours, Friday, September 23, at the appeal trial of the January 2015 attacks against Charlie Hebdo, the Hyper Cacher of Vincennes and in Montrouge. Mme Poux, 57, began by recalling that she worked for ten years, from 2009 to 2019, at the anti-terrorism center nicknamed “the Saint-Eloi gallery”. She served as coordinator there for the past two years, before joining the Orléans Court of Appeal.
The dossier of the January 2015 attacks, which she described as ” extraordinary “, is one of those that mark the life of a magistrate. She devoted four full years to it. “These attacks were a shock but not a surprise, because we felt that things were happening”confided, by way of preamble, the one who describes herself as “most pessimistic” judges then responsible for investigating anti-terrorism cases.
Ironically, Nathalie Poux, then a beginner in the anti-terrorist pole and on duty at the weekend, was the one who had indicted, on May 22, 2010, Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, two of the three perpetrators of the January 2015 attacks. , for a plan to escape from prison by Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem, a former Algerian GIA convicted for the wave of attacks in 1995 in France. “I had the impression of having seen them the day before, when they were dead”she says.
The worst “has happened”
Before detailing the architecture of her investigation file, Nathalie Poux explained that she had questioned Ali Riza Polat twelve times and Amar Ramdani seven times, the two men sentenced to the heaviest sentences at first instance and tried today. on appeal today.
She also expressed her doubts and regrets, in particular concerning the role played by the religious mentor of Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, Djamel Beghal, a former member of the GIA and then of Al-Qaeda. She regrets the fact of not having been able to formally identify the shooter who seriously injured Romain D., a jogger from Fontenay-aux-Roses (Hauts-de-Seine), on the evening of January 7, 2015, and expresses her certainty that in Montrouge, the next morning, before killing a municipal policewoman, Coulibaly intended to go to a Jewish school to kill children there: “I can’t say that we avoided the worst because it happened…”
But it is above all the choice to separate the case of Peter Chérif, a former member of the “Buttes-Chaumont sector”, arrested in December 2018 in Djibouti, a few weeks before the completion of the investigation and the issuance of the order of indictment, which is debatable. Was it necessary to stop everything to add to the file the man who probably made the link between the Kouachi brothers, whom he had known since the mid-2000s, and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA), sponsor of the attack against Charlie Hebdo ? It was to delay the trial and further lengthen the delays of justice without the assurance of obtaining much more: “We could have taken more time, I’m not sure that justice would have won”she says.
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