Index – Abroad – Trials of the perpetrators of the Paris terrorist attack claiming 100 dead have begun

The one now beginning will be the largest trial in the history of modern French justice. The main defendant is the only surviving assassin, Salah Abdeslam, and 13 other associates who helped the killers carry out their plan. A total of twenty people are charged, six of them in their absence. The charge is murder, complicity and terrorist conspiracy. Most of them, including Abdeslam, face life imprisonment.

There will be one hundred and forty days of hearings over the next nine months. One thousand eight hundred survivors and relatives of the victims will be heard by the judges, with 330 lawyers speaking. The accounts of about three hundred eyewitnesses will also be heard, including the then French head of state, François Hollande. Hollande considers the trial to be a very important event, citing the massacre as an act of war.

On 13 November 2015, the Islamic State undertook the attack on a stadium in Paris, several bars and restaurants and the Bataclan Concert Hall. The evening began at half past 10, with an attack in various locations killing at a stadium, another death squad in bars and restaurants shot downtown, a third terrorist cell breaking into the Bataclan concert hall – where there was a concert – and starting to shoot indiscriminately. Ninety people were killed at this location alone. The attackers were killed by police, except for Abdeslam, who managed to escape.

The hearing will take place in a special place on the island in the center of the French capital, the Île de la Citén. The scene and its surroundings were almost airtight closed by the police, and witnesses, relatives and their lawyers could only get to the special courtroom after several inspections. Philippe Duperron, who lost his son Thomas in a bloodbath in the concert hall, said he came to the hearing with very mixed emotions, mostly filled with impatience and anxiety. “It will be painful to hear the testimonies of survivors and relatives,” he said bitterly.

One survivor told the French press that he wanted to hear from other survivors how they were able to process what had happened.

I am a soldier of the Islamic State!

When the judge in charge of the trial asked Salah Abdeslam, now 31, in a black T-shirt with a big beard appearing in the room, to testify, his first sentence was: I am a soldier of the Islamic State! Abdeslam is primarily accused of providing logistical assistance to the assassins. He fled the site of the massacre, where he left his explosive vest, which was later discovered by investigators and could not be activated. His comrades smuggled across the Belgian border in a car even on the night of the attack, and for a time he became the most sought-after criminal in Europe.

It was only four months later that he was caught in a shooting that broke into a shooting in Brussels. He also refused to speak at his trial in Belgium and later did not cooperate with the French investigating officers. Experts fear he will not speak at this monstre trial either. Among his accused comrades is Mohamed Abrini, who is accused of financing the entire operation and he acquired the weapons for the terrorists. The 36-year-old man will have to stand trial again next year for the 2016 bombing in Brussels. Other suspects include two close acquaintances of Abdeslam who are suspected of smuggling across the Belgian border on the night of the massacre.

(Cover image: Evacuated people after the terrorist attack in Paris on November 16, 2015. Photo: János Bődey / Index)