A 46 -year -old Tunisian was interviewed yesterday about his disturbing exchanges on Facebook with the killer of the Promenade des Anglais in the months preceding the attack.
By Soren Seelow
If it was necessary to follow a single day of the trial of the attack on July 14, 2016 in Nice to measure complexity, ambivalence, undecidability and to say the quirk of the facts deemed there, was undoubtedly this one. While the Paris Special Assize Court had theoretically finished with the examination of the facts, one of the accused, Chokri Chafroud, who faces 20 years in prison for “association of terrorist criminals”, was again questioned on Tuesday 22 November.
This surprise interrogation was not planned in the initial schedule. He follows the payment of the debates of Conversations on Facebook between this 46-year-old Tunisian undocumented and the killer of the Promenade des Anglais in the months preceding the attack. Only a few extracts paid to the investigation had been mentioned during his first interrogation on November 10, but a lawyer for civil parties, M e samia maktouf, asked that all of their exchanges be translated from Arabic and debated at the hearing.
This trial will undoubtedly do not bring to civil parties all the answers they expect on the deep reasons of this monstrous attack: the killer of the Promenade des Anglais, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, took them with him in the tomb . But there is an invisible story behind this audience, made of hypotheses and fantasies. She lives, we guessed it over the weeks, in the troubled relationship that the terrorist had with his friend Chokri Chafroud, whose poisonous ambiguity transpires from these conversations.
frustration and verbal violence
We are in early 2016. After a few months in Nice, where he did not find a job, Chokri Chafroud returned to Tunisia and suffers from finding the misery he had wanted to flee. In his correspondence with the terrorist, he is sorry for the economic situation of his country (“It is the brothel Tunisia”, “there is neither work nor future, nothing apart from humiliation” …), and is worried about the political situation after a series of deadly attacks carried out against the regular army by the Islamic State organization: “That’s it, Tunisia is nicious.”
In this devastated landscape, Chokri Chafroud despairs. He dreams of gathering enough money to try his luck in Nice, and asks his friend’s length of messages to help him find a job in the building. The problematic dimension of these exchanges is that to express its frustration, Chokri Chafroud, whose intelligence is in the “lower average” according to an expert, uses images of extreme violence.
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