A second accused was questioned on Thursday. In a text sent a few minutes before the attack, the terrorist of the Promenade des Anglais had described him as a possible accomplice.
by Soren Seelow
The more the weeks go by, the more the trial of the attack on July 14, 2016 in Nice looks like an impossible post-mortem analysis of what was tramed in the head of the terrorist. From the interpretation given to the actions and writings of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed 86 people aboard a truck on the Promenade des Anglais before being shot, depends the fate of several accused of this trial. All owe their presence in the box to the profusion of indices incriminating them left by the terrorist just before his act.
In the absence of the author of the facts, this kiss of Judas opens an abyss of hypotheses: carried away by a psychotic delirium, the killer of the Promenade des Anglais fantasized a terrorist cell which does not did not exist, as we say on the defense benches? Did his friends participate in the preparation of his attack, as several civil party lawyers think? The president of the Paris Special Assize Court, Laurent Raviot, advanced, Thursday, November 10, a third hypothesis in the form of synthesis: and if the delirium of the terrorist had been fueled and supported by one of the accused?
After having looked into the case of a first accused, Walid Ghraieb, who, by dint of denying everything, did not enlighten anything, the special Assize Court of Paris has been interested since Tuesday in a second Friend of the killer, Chokri Chafroud. His interrogation, Thursday, lasted nearly nine o’clock. Nine hours to try to perceive a logic in the tormented brain of the killer, nine hours of questions tirelessly coming up against the same answers: “I am not in his head”, “I do not know what was going on in his mind” … It took all the patience and subtlety of the president to try to introduce a little rationality in a file which is sorely lacking and on which hovers a great intellectual misery.
“It is for Chokri and his friends “
Chokri Chafroud, a 43 -year -old Tunisian with a chaotic course, worked in the building in Nice at the time of the facts. Coming from a rural family from southern Tunisian, he stopped school at the age of 11 to sell flowers to tourists in a hotel in Sousse before migrating, at 26, in Italy to work in the hotel industry . Ten years later, in the summer of 2015, he moved to Nice clandestinely. He lives in the street, “like a tramp”, when he meets, at the end of 2015, by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in a Bistro Nice, “Le Gaulois”.
This man, of an intelligence being “in the lower average”, according to an expert, is at the heart of the original mystery of this file: six minutes before launching his truck on the crowd, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had sent a Text to another accused, Ramzi Arefa, presenting Chokri Chafroud like an accomplice: “Salam Ramzi (…) I wanted to tell you that the pistol you gave me yesterday, so we bring 5 from your boyfriend , 7 rue Miollis, 5 e floor. It’s for Chokri and his friends, [they] are ready for next month. “
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