After a month of audience on the stories of the civil parties, the defendants have the floor, and will be interviewed in turn until the end of the week on their course and personality.
Curious sensation, Tuesday 2 November, at the recovery of the trial of the attacks of 13-November in front of the Paris Special Assize Court: Nobody cried, no one mentioned his injuries by bullets, nor the loss From a close to the Bataclan or on a Parisian terrace, nor its post-traumatic stress. After a month of hearing on the horrors of the night of November 13, 2015 by those who suffered them, the word is the accused.
Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini, first. These two natives of Brussels are united by their proximity in alphabetical order, by their childhood in Molenbeek, where they were neighbors, and by a destiny of former suicide candidate still alive. If the things happened as planned, the first would have operated, on the night of November 13, 2015, the explosive belt found intact three days later in a street south of Paris, and the second would have triggered, on March 22, 2016 The bomb he pushed on a luggage cart at Brussels Airport.
them alone know why things did not happen as planned, and the question was not asked them on Tuesday, since it is not the object of the personality review that occupies the Court this week. This is for the moment to briefly trace the course of the accused – childhood, family, schooling, professional life, detention – without evoking the burdens on each of them, which will be studied in January 2022.
Since there was no question of their radicalization or the facts that are reproached for them, the two failing kamikazes have become again, on Tuesday, the time of an interrogation, boys almost like the others. “You know, we did not come out of the belly of our mothers with Kalashnikovs in hand,” said Mohamed Abrini. There has been a life before switching into terrorism.
“I was a good student”
Salah Abdeslam has risen first. Did his lawyers have called for restraint? Can it be moved by the endless distress of the civil parties? We will not know, nobody asked him, but the accused number one was no longer the same. We had known vehement and clumsy since the opening of the debates, aggravating his case with each speech; He appeared serene and courteous Tuesday, little loquacious but answering the questions gladly. The discreet smile he sometimes posted was nothing provocative. The laughter who sometimes rested in the courtroom had nothing mocking. If we had not been at trial of the attacks of 13-November, the light exchanges would have been found.
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