“The hearing is resumed, please sit down,” announces the president of the specially composed assize court Jean-Louis Périès. The time of the verdict of the trial of November 13, the epilogue of ten long months of debates, has just sounded. After hours of waiting, the defendants entered the box, a little after 8 p.m., this Wednesday, June 29, with drawn features. Salah Abdeslam is introduced first. He is seated, as always, at the end nearest the court. The room, crowded as ever, filled with very many victims sometimes coming with their families, was silent.
“At the end of 148 days of hearing, where nearly 400 civil parties were heard, where 189 lawyers and 30 defense lawyers pleaded, the court wanted to write detailed reasons”, begins President Périès. He specifies that they are more than 120 pages and that he does not intend “to impose the reading of this document” which will obviously be “held at the disposal of the parties”. He is therefore preparing “to indicate the main elements retained in support of this decision”.
Then he specifies this, which immediately makes it clear that the judgment rendered will be severe: “The answer was yes by a majority of votes to all the questions with the exception” of one of the twenty defendants (Farid Kharkhach). Clearly: “The 19 others are found guilty of all the offenses for which they were sent to court. In the box, the defendants freeze.
The magistrate reads his “excerpts” at top speed. The strongest sentences are inflicted on those whom the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office had called “the two survivors of the death convoy”, Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini.
Salah Abdeslam’s explosive vest “was not functional”
In accordance with the required sentence, the tenth man of the commandos of November 13, 2015 is sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment – or to life imprisonment, this “slow death penalty” against which his lawyers had pleaded. “His guilt as a co-perpetrator” of all the attacks perpetrated that evening was therefore upheld, the court considering “that the different targets should be analyzed as a single crime scene”.
For the judges, “the vest (explosive) was not functional”, which means that they “seriously question” his statements about a renunciation in a bar in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, as he argued during the trial. “If the target chosen, metro or bar, cannot be determined with certainty, it fits perfectly into a plan of coordinated and simultaneous attacks”, they believe.
The court also does not adhere to the scenario of a last-minute recruit supported by its defense, considering that the integration of Salah Abdeslam into the terrorist cell “is well before the attacks, contrary to his statements”. According to her, he notably made four of the five trips to recover the future members of the commandos – he only recognized two of them.
Mohamed Abrini, “fully integrated into the terrorist cell”
For Mohamed Abrini, “the man in the hat” of the Brussels attacks, the judgment also complies with the requisitions. Salah Abdeslam’s childhood friend is sentenced to life imprisonment, with 22 years of security.
For the court, this Belgian-Moroccan “acquired in the theses of the Islamic State” from the departure of his brother in Syria, was offered to participate in the attacks during his own stay, from the summer of 2014.
In addition to “his trip to Syria testifying to his desire to wage jihad”, he was then “fully integrated into the terrorist cell”, participating in numerous preparations. “Passenger of the Clio, lead car of the convoy of death, he cannot claim to have been unaware until the last moment of the purpose and the targets of the attacks”, judges the court.
Sentences below the requisitions for 11 of the accused
The verdict is implacable for the “headliners” of this trial, but below the requisitions for the eleven other defendants. Thus Mohamed Bakkali, who, according to the court, “played a key role in the logistics of the attacks”, was sentenced to 30 years in prison, when the PNAT had requested life imprisonment.
The two soldiers of the Islamic State “chosen for a mission in Europe”, Osama Krayem and Sofien Ayari, also escape the life imprisonment claimed: they are sentenced to 30 years in prison. Other sentences lower than those requested for the two “disgruntled operatives”, Muhammad Usman and Adel Haddadi, stranded on their way to Europe, who are sentenced to 18 years in prison (20 required).
The judgment is well below the requisitions for two defendants with a ten-year sentence for Ali El Haddad Asufi (16 required), implicated for the search for weapons. And a two-year prison sentence (six required) for Farid Kharkhach, intermediary between the cell and the suppliers of the false identity cards. He is the only defendant for whom the qualification of terrorism has been dropped. He has already spent more time in prison than his sentence and is expected to be released later this evening.
As for Yassine Atar, brother of the “mastermind of the attacks” and cousin of his chief logisticians, whose defense had requested acquittal, the court considered him guilty of the terrorist association of criminals and sentenced him to the intermediate sentence of eight years in prison (nine required).
Free defendants embraced by civil parties
President Périès speaks directly to the three free defendants to tell them that the sentences imposed will prevent them from returning behind bars. On his jump seat, Abdellah Chouaa (four years in prison, three of which are suspended) is in tears. As soon as the hearing is over, he rushes into the arms of his wife and his lawyers. Many civil parties hug him.
His comrade Ali Oulkadi (five years including three suspended) does not hold back his tears either. He too embraces the victims who come to surround him. “I’m going to find my children,” he says, upset.
As for the defendants who were absent and tried in absentia, five incompressible life sentences were pronounced, in particular against Osama Atar, “the emir of the external operations cell”, the one who “projected his combatants from Syria “, and against the brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, the propagandists of the EI, whom the court considers “as combatants in their own right”. For these men, whose death in the Iraqi-Syrian zone is not “formally proven”, the warrants of committal retain their full effect.