The trial of the accomplices of the November 13th, 2015 jihadist massacre that claimed 130 lives in Paris and Saint-Denis has been widely described as a trial for history.
On Wednesday night, 19 of 20 defendants were convicted of terrorism offences, with sentences ranging from two years to life in prison. The 20th was found guilty of fraud, for having provided false identity papers to jihadists. Fourteen defendants were in the courtroom; six others were convicted in absentia and are believed to have died in Syria.
The conduct of the 10-month-long trial, and the carefully weighed verdicts, were almost universally praised. “The court handed down individual sentences, despite the heavy charge of emotion. It must be recognised that justice has been done,” said Isa Gultaslar, a lawyer. Her client, Sofien Ayari, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for an aborted plot to attack Schiphol airport in Amsterdam on the day of the atrocities in Paris.
When the trial opened on September 8th last, Judge Jean-Louis Périès stressed that it was about the law, not vengeance. It often felt like a form of group therapy, for the victims but also for a nation that has lost more than 330 lives to Islamist attacks, as counted by the Fondapol think tank.
By plunging back into the horror of that night, 397 civil plaintiffs ensured that events were recorded for history. Grégory Reibenberg, the manager of La Belle Équipe café, where 21 people were shot dead, watched his wife Djamila die. She was “an extraordinary woman”, he said. With her last breath, she said “Tess”, the name of the couple’s eight-year-old daughter.
A civil plaintiff called Gaelle was seriously wounded and lost her partner Mathieu at the Bataclan concert hall. She described how the left side of her face was sliced off by bullets and hung round her neck. She tried to pull broken teeth from her mouth “so as not to swallow them, because it made me cough and risked drawing the terrorists’ attention”. Gaelle played dead. “My blood was seeping away and I felt myself softly departing. I accepted that I was going to die.”
Véronique Roy-Burin, whose son Quentin, a convert to Islam, was recruited by the Islamic State terror group and died in Syria, said the end of the trial brought tears to her eyes. “It was a national trial, a national mourning.”
Roy-Burin is campaigning for the repatriation of 200 French children stuck in camps in Syria. “They are innocent and must not be held responsible for the acts of their [jihadist] parents,” she said. Arthur Denouveaux, a survivor of the Bataclan attack and the president of the Life for Paris victims’ association, has joined the campaign.
After the verdict was read, civil plaintiffs fell into each other’s arms, then went across the street for a subdued celebration in a cafe. “People are more human than one thinks,” Roy-Burin said. “Even in tragedy and mourning, they come together. This trial has been a lesson in humanity.”
The attacks at the Stade de France, at six bars and restaurants and the Bataclan “must be analysed as a single crime scene”, the five judges wrote in a 126-page explanation of the verdict. “Each of the terrorists present in Paris and Saint-Denis must be regarded as a co-author of all the attacks committed on November 13th, 2015, without distinguishing between the targets assigned to each of them.”
Salah Abdeslam, the most notorious defendant and the only survivor of the 10-man squad that committed the slaughter, told the court he was not a murderer, that his participation had been limited to dropping off three suicide bombers at the Stade de France. He nonetheless received a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the harshest penalty in the French judiciary arsenal, which had been used only four times previously. It is limited by law to child killers and those who kill or attempt to kill policemen. It was extended to terrorist crimes seven months after the Bataclan attacks, but could not be applied retroactively.
The court, however, found Abdeslam guilty of complicity in the attempted murder of policemen at the Bataclan. “Salah Abdeslam was not there. He was not even aware of the final confrontation [between the jihadists and police, who stormed the building after midnight],” his lawyer Olivia Ronen argued. Abdeslam has 10 days to appeal his sentence.
Mohamed Abrini, who with Abdeslam rented cars and hotel rooms for the jihadists, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 22 years. Abrini travelled from Brussels to Paris in the “convoy of death”, but left the city on the eve of the attacks, which is why he received a lesser sentence than Abdeslam.
“Like Salah Abdeslam, [Abrini] cannot claim to have been ignorant of the modalities of the attacks or the targets chosen,” the judges said. Both men still cling to their Islamist convictions and continue to represent “a real danger” because they are “faithful to [their] ideology”.
The court had more clemency for the “small fry” who had the misfortune of coming into contact with the jihadists, mostly as drivers and without knowledge of the criminal plot. The charge of associating with terrorists was reduced to associating with fraudsters for Farid Kharkhach, a counterfeiter who provided false identity papers.
There have been dozens more jihadist attacks in France since the atrocities of that Friday night. Among the most memorable, 86 people were mowed down by a lorry driver on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. An ageing priest had his throat slashed while he said Mass near Rouen. Schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded for having shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
In March 2019, Islamic State lost the last territory it held in Syria and Iraq. Its defeat has made large-scale, co-ordinated attacks like those of November 13th, 2015 less likely. Yet the bloodshed left France with a sense of vulnerability and contributed to the progression of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic political parties.
