2023-10-26 17:15:22
Police officers, rue Saint-Augustin, in Paris, after the attack in the Opera district, May 12, 2018. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP
At each attack trial, the words and the pain are the same. Whether it left one dead or a hundred, whether Kalashnikov bullets tore flesh or a kitchen knife stabbed a neck, the terrorist attack, because it strikes randomly, absurdly, at civilians who came home from work, drank a beer on a terrace or danced in a concert hall, because it dehumanizes its victims, always produces the same astonishment, the same annihilation, the same psychological wounds that the years do not erase.
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The second day of hearing of the trial of the attack in the Opera district, in Paris, which left one dead and four physically injured, on May 12, 2018, was devoted to the hearing of the civil parties, Thursday October 26 . Around ten survivors of this attack took the stand one after the other to recount these few minutes during which a « zombie », “cold, as if already dead”and “remote controlled robot” who shouted “God is great”threw himself on a dozen passers-by, in the middle of the street, armed with a knife.
The first victim of this attack, Ronan Gosnet, an employee in a local bookstore, was the only one to have been killed by the attacker, a 19-year-old Frenchman of Chechen origin who was shot dead by a police officer six minutes later. None of his relatives wanted to testify. Seriously injured, Zijiang Y., a Chinese, was his second target. After several operations, doctors belatedly discovered the tip of the killer’s knife lodged in his skull. “He had a cold face, a blank look, I didn’t see any hatredhe remembers. He gave me the impression of a person who no longer has a soul, who doesn’t think, only executes. »
“I wake up at night and see his face”
Dora S. witnessed the attack with her brother Yacine. She spent six months in a day hospital to treat her trauma. She has no physical injuries. But watching her tremble like a leaf at the bar, six years after the events, jumping and turning around at the slightest noise coming from the room, a slamming door, a creaking chair, we measure to what extent those of the soul are difficult to cure. Benjamin P. received a stab in the stomach. But it’s not his body that makes him suffer: “I wake up at night and see his face, every night…”
And then there is this couple, Justine and Olivier U., 26 years old and 32 years old at the time of the events, both as blond as the other. She was injured in the face, he tried to protect her, armed only with his backpack. Olivier U. kept, engraved in his memory, every second of the attack: “I see this young man who appearshe begins, I see him crying and shouting “Allahu akbar”. He staggers forward, his eyes wide, I see the blood on the knife, his hands, the color of the blood, red-brown, a horrible palette that makes you understand that it’s real blood. »
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