“From September 8, 2021 to June 29, 2022: the trial of the Paris and Saint-Denis attacks will have been the longest in all of French judicial history”, wrote Wednesday, June 29, in the afternoon, the Belgian daily The evening. The wait will have been long, but the verdict of the trial of the attacks of November 13 has finally come: nineteen of the twenty defendants have been found guilty of all the charges attributed to them.
Among them, notes the British newspaper The GuardianSalah Abdeslam “the only survivor of the ten-man commando that hit Paris in 2015”, was convicted of organized gang murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The court therefore did not believe his story that he had given up activating his explosive belt. The man was sentenced to an irreducible life sentence.
It is the heaviest penalty provided for by the French penal code, very rarely applied and which makes any possibility of release minimal. This one, writes for its part The Swiss daily Time, “has only been pronounced four times since its inception in 1994, exclusively for child murders involving sex crimes. The defense of Salah Abdeslam had called for ‘to separate things’ and to avoid this ‘slow death penalty’ hitherto reserved for ‘psychopaths’. For his lawyers, this 32-year-old Frenchman is a ‘deserter’. An interpretation which will therefore not have been that of the Court.