Defeated by police officers, the author of the attack on the truck who left 86 dead will not be tried at the trial which opens on Monday. In his absence, eight accused, none of which is considered radicalized, will appear before the Special Assize Court, in Paris.
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Two months after the end of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, the provisional room “major trial”, specially built in the history of justice of the Cité de la Cité, in Paris, is preparing To host a second terrorist trial which will also mark the memoirs because of the immense barbarism of the facts and its emotional charge without measure: that of the second deadliest attack having struck France since the Second World War, the attack on the truck which left 86 dead and several hundred injured, on July 14, 2016, on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice.
Two attacks, two trials, two appalling human assessments. Like that of November 13, the trial of the Nice attack, which opens on Monday September 5 and is expected to last three and a half months, will give a large place to the words of the victims, injured or close to disappeared. Before the start of the hearing, 865 people had formed civil parties, and nearly 250 have already announced their desire to testify. A tsunami of horror, of physical and mental injuries, of impossible mourning, of anger too, is preparing to pour again in the clear wooden room of the court of seats specially composed of Paris.
But if these two trials meet in the atrocity of the facts judged, they diverge on an essential point, which will make two very different audiences. Faced with them, in the accused box, the victims of November 13 had a “co-author” of the attacks, Salah Abdeslam, and accomplices, last representatives of a constituted terrorist cell. In the box of the Nice trial will take place neither author nor accomplice, no cell strictly speaking.
The author of the attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, killed by police officers, will not be tried. In his absence, eight accused, none of whom is considered radicalized, are sent to the Assize Court: three of his relatives for association of terrorist criminals, and five people who did not know him, judged for simple criminal offenses relating to the supply of his weapon. The gap between the ocean of pain that the victims will bring to the bar and the insignificance of the accused who will face them has probably never been so abyssal in a terrorist trial. The risk of disappointing the expectations of the civil parties in search of answers is immense.
The cemetery of the Promenade des Anglais
The fireworks had just ended, on this national day, when the Promenade des Anglais turned into a cemetery. At 10:33 p.m., Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian driver, deliberately rushes on the crowd gathered for the festivities aboard a rental heavy vehicle. On almost 2 kilometers, he shreds under his past, old men, women and children. His murderous ride interrupted after four minutes and seventeen seconds, when he is shot down by police officers behind the wheel of his 19 tonnes after opening fire with a semi-automatic pistol.
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