at the trial of Réda Kriket, the methods of the investigation contested by the defense

It is an uneventful trial which has been held for five weeks before the special assize court in Paris. That of three men accused of having fomented a plan of attack of which nothing is known. How did Réda Kriket, Anis Bahri and Abderrahman Ameuroud form the terrorist criminal association for which they are being tried? We don’t know. What were to be the target and the modus operandi of this attack? Nobody knows. In this cloud of hypotheses, the prosecution has a centerpiece: an impressive cache of weapons discovered on March 24, 2016 in an apartment rented by Kriket in Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise).

The prosecution, which requested life imprisonment against the three men, failed to offer a coherent account of this case, so many gray areas are there. Thursday April 8, the lawyer of Réda Kriket, M^e Yassine Bouzrou, threw himself on this blank page to insinuate doubt at the very root of the matter. His argument, of a formidable effectiveness, developed in three stages. First, to weaken the adversary: ​​the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI). Then reinterpret the material elements. Finally, offer an alternative story: the weapons cache was to be used for robberies.

The original sin of this case, he pleads, is to have left the DGSI to investigate alone, and not in co-operation with a judicial investigation service having “Broader expertise”, including banditry. Due to its cognitive biases, this anti-terrorism service would have been unable to consider a lead outside its framework: “The DGSI has only one objective: they get up every morning and say to themselves that they are going to foil attacks. The rest does not interest them. For them, a chisel, a cutter, is terrorism. Our system allows investigators to put their beliefs to the record that my client was going to commit bloodshed. From there, nothing could change their mind. “

“A tear gas attack”

After the deconstruction of the method, make way for the material elements: “It would be too easy to tell you that this investigation is not without explanations. So I’m going to tell you about what we found in the Argenteuil apartment. “ The lawyer first mentions the TATP – a homemade explosive used by the Islamic State (IS) organization – found in a Tupperware: “We have the mark of terrorism! But the weigh-in does not appear anywhere in the file. Why ? Because we realize that there is very little, probably not more than 5 grams. ”

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