Justice returns to this night of terror of the terrorist assaults that struck the Stade de France, the Paris terraces, and the Bataclan six years ago, starting this Wednesday and lasting nine months.
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| [Paris,France] |
“9:16 p.m.: First explosion at the Stade de France (gate D)
9:20 p.m.: Second explosion at the Stade de France (gate H)
9:24 p.m.: First shooting on the terraces of the bar Le Carillon and the restaurant Le Petit Cambodge
9:26 p.m .: Second shooting on the terraces of the café La Bonne Bière and the restaurant Casa Nostra
9:36 p.m .: Third shooting on the terraces of the restaurant la Belle Equipe
9:41 p.m .: Explosion in the Comptoir Voltaire restaurant
9:47 p.m .: Start of the Bataclan attack
9:53 pm: Third explosion at the Stade de France (gate B) ”
Thirty-seven minutes have passed. It feels like an eternity. The order of indictment, which brings 20 suspects to the Assize Court, details these minutes, which began on November 13, 2015, in a clinical manner. We can all recall what we were doing that evening -the. In the Parisian night, a cold quiet creeps in, television screens are turned on, and police and ambulance sirens wail.
The nine-month trial for these terrible assaults, which left 130 people dead and hundreds more injured, is set to begin on September 8. To accommodate this unprecedented hearing, a dedicated chamber was erected in the center of the Paris courthouse. The emotional toll will be high, and the security and organizational resources employed will be massive. The 542 volumes of proceedings will be dissected over the course of 140 days of hearings.
Twelve of the twenty defendants risk life in jail. Over 1,800 civil parties, 330 attorneys (including 30 defense counsel), and over 1,000 media from across the world have all been accredited. On November 10, former President of the Republic François Hollande will be called as a witness. The hearing, like the trial of the "Charlie Hebdo" and "Hyper Cacher" assaults, will be filmed "for History." The debates will also be aired on a Web radio dedicated to civic parties, albeit with a small delay.
There is no jury when it comes to terrorism. The court is made up entirely of magistrates. Their contribution is enormous. Jean-Louis Périès will preside over the specially constituted Assize Court. To analyze the responsibility of each of the 20 accused and to convey what the inquiry has found with clarity, gray areas, and questions, it will have to move beyond emotion. The prosecution will be represented by three magistrates from the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office, which is a first.
On the eve of this pivotal hearing, what do we know? The sequence of impeachment is quite rigorous. It covers over 400 pages, detailing the attacks and attempting to explain how these mass killings were carried out. Four years of research have allowed a major portion of the attack's logistics to be reconstructed, including the commandos' travel through Europe after being trained in Daesh camps in Syria and returning to their hideaways leased in Belgium and near Paris soon before the assaults.
The inquiry indicates that the Islamic State (IS) established "of a real structure intended to plan and organize attacks abroad" in June 2014, according to the investigating judges. This "foreign operations unit" was led by Oussama Atar, a Belgian-Moroccan known as "Abu Ahmad al-Iraki." This final jihad warrior is one of the defendants being prosecuted in his absence, despite the fact that he is thought dead. Yassine Atar, his brother, will be in the box. All members of the November 13, 2015 commandos passed through this "Copex," which also killed 32 people at the airport and the Brussels metro on March 22, 2016.
The three synchronized commandos, each made up of three armed guys, were trained in Daesh camps. On November 13, 2015, they hit multiple times, the first near the Stade de France, where a friendly match between France and Germany was being played. Almost simultaneously, another commando fires machine guns from the terraces of cafés and restaurants in the center of Paris; three more terrorists storm the Bataclan, shooting at the crowd and taking hostages. Soon after midnight, the attack will begin. After detonating their explosive vests filled with TATP (a "signature" Daesh explosive) and hundreds of nuts to act as grape shot, seven of the nine suicide bombers would perish.
At the scene of the attacks, investigators will locate numerous corpses, which will make identification difficult at first. The jihadists, on the other hand, left marks all over the place as if they were a jigsaw puzzle. “Thanks to the electronic data, we immediately begin a triangulation process. A suicide bomber (later identified as terrorist Bilal Hadfi) is seen making a phone call on telesurveillance footage near the Stade de France. The 20,000 calls in the region instantly prompt a demarcation operation, according to François Molins. At the time of the assaults, the high magistrate, who is now the attorney general of the Court of Cassation, was the attorney of Paris. He was one of the first on the scene and led the investigation.
Investigators will also find a Samsung phone in a trash can near the Bataclan with a message sent to Belgium at 9:42 p.m., which reads, “We are gone, we are starting.” They claim this is proof that the attacks are coordinated. "All exchanged with Belgian numbers" François Molins explains. He established international collaboration with Belgium on November 15 and formed a joint investigative team. "We quickly know that two surviving suicide bombers are in the wild," François Molins remembers. The search has begun.
The vehicles used in the deadly missions are immediately identified. In front of the Bataclan, first a black Polo. On November 9, a man named Salah Abdeslam rented it in Belgium. However, the Franco-name Moroccan's would not be revealed until early Saturday afternoon. He has already left. On his journey to Belgium with Mohamed Amri and Hamza Attou, who were also among the accused today, he was stopped by gendarmes at the Hordain tollgate (near Cambrai) on the morning of the 14th. Salah Abdeslam, who was known to Belgian security agencies, was not yet the subject of an international arrest order and was free to continue his journey. In Belgium, it won't be stopped until March 2016.
He was the one who led the Belgian attackers at the Stade de France before leaving his Clio in the XVIIIth arrondissement, according to investigators. Ten days after the assaults in Montrouge, south of Paris, his faulty explosive vest would be discovered. What is the reason behind this? It's a riddle that neither the inquiry nor the individual in question has been able to solve. The next day, an ISIS news release claiming responsibility for the November 13 assaults mentions an 18th-century target.
However, there was no attack at the location where Salah Abdeslam abandoned the Clio. Has he taken a step back? Salah Abdeslam "had cried and cried while saying that he had participated in the attacks in Paris, that he was the tenth man and the sole survivor," according to the two companions who drove him back to Belgium the day after the attacks.
In Montreuil, a seat used by patio shooters was discovered. It includes three assault weapons, 17 magazines, most of which are empty, and knives, and it is rented in Belgium by Salah Abdeslam's brother, Brahim. The final occupants of the automobile, according to the prints and samples taken inside, were Brahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up at Comptoir Voltaire, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and Chakib Akrouh.
Abaaoud is immediately shown to be the mastermind of the three assaults. When he is discovered, he would be executed together with Chakib Akrouh and his cousin Hasna At Boulahcen during a raid by the Raid at a Saint-Denis apartment where they had taken sanctuary. According to specific testimony, Abaaoud "threatened France with new imminent attacks and mentioned various targets, in particular a shopping center and a police station of the Defense" the investigating judges disclose. This might explain why, on the night of November 13-14, he did not blow himself up with his partner.
The objectives had been established a few days before the events, according to a computer recovered in a garbage can in Belgium in March 2016, most likely abandoned by one of the terrorists. The three cars used to convey "the convoy of death," as one of the defendants describes it, were hired on November 9, and the conspiratorial flats of Bobigny and Alfortville (where the terrorists will wait to leave for the location of the attacks) were rented on November 10 and 11. On November 11, a fleet of 14 specialized telephones was deployed before the commandos left Belgium for France on November 12.
Many questions remain unexplained despite this careful investigation. Sole Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the November 13 commandos, and Mohamed Abrini, who followed the November 13 commandos in the Paris region and allegedly assisted in the funding and supply of weapons, face the court today. Salah Abdeslam, on the other hand, has steadfastly refused to speak up since the inquiry began. Six of the 20 accused, including the Clain brothers and Oussama Attar, are assumed dead but have yet to be proven. They will be judged when they are not present. The rest of the defendants - logisticians, drivers, and so on - are all engaged in some way.
Will the court, which will not interrogate them until 2022, be successful in getting them to speak? This is one of the trial's difficulties. The defense takes care of the suspense while waiting for the hearing. "This trial promises to be charged with emotion," the attorneys for Salah Abdeslam, Olivia Ronen, and Martin Vettes warn, "but justice will have to keep them at a distance if it does not want to lose sight of the principles that founded our rule of law." “We won't be able to function without expressing our pain. What matters is not to lose sight of the purpose of the trial, which is to assess each defendant's share of responsibility,” says Christian Saint-Palais, president of the Association of Criminal Lawyers Defending Yassine Atar.
The stakes are particularly high for civil party attorneys. "Will I be worthy enough of the victims I defend, will I be able to raise their voices high enough?" Jean Reinhart, who represents over a hundred victims and the 13onze15 organization, is concerned. "The trial is going to be important, it is a beginning of reconstruction for them" he says.
On behalf of the civil parties' attorneys, we promise that we have learnt the lessons of the trial of the assaults on "Charlie Hebdo" and Hyper Cacher, in which the lawyers' inquiries occasionally devolved into true unending indictments. Frédérique Giffard, a victim's lawyer, adds, "We divided the file to be complementary and as less redundant as possible,"
They even contemplated switching the regular sequence of questioning the accused or witnesses to have the prosecution speak first, rather than the attorneys for the civil parties, as is common (the defense has always speaking last). "We cannot agree to change the practices in a trial of such magnitude without knowing the consequences," says Xavier Nogueras, the lawyer for one of the defendants, Mohamed Amri.
The civil parties will be allowed to speak for five weeks under the hearing schedule. One of them will be Jean-François Dymarski. "We will do it together with Maurice [Lausch, editor's note]" this old instructor says. Both families had to say goodbye to their only kid. Marie and Mathias perished in the Bataclan when they were 23 and 24 years old. The devastated parents will come to tell about the night of November 13-14, 2015, when they drove their automobile from the Metz area to Paris at midnight. “We spent the night in hospitals and police stations showing the photos of Mathias and Marie. "We didn't give up hope."
Finally, on November 14, Mathias and Marie's parents will hear that they have been transported to the forensic institution. "We had to recognize the bodies through a window," Mathias' father laments, "and we couldn't kiss them one last time for another week." “I tried to understand how this barbarism began,” one former instructor says, “but I gave up because nothing can explain it in reality.” This trial will not change anything, but I am eagerly anticipating it because I want justice."
The author Valerie de Senneville is a chief investigative journalist of Les Echos.
[This article is translated from Les Echos, September 08, 2021]