Judged since Thursday, January 5, accused Mahiedine Merabet denounced a political trial before refusing to answer questions. The fog that surrounds the journey of his accomplice, Clément Baur, has continued to thicken over his interrogation.
by Soren Seelow
It is an intriguing duo that has appeared for two days before the Paris Special Assize Court. The personality, the biography, the way of speaking and until the defense strategy: everything seems to oppose Clément Baur, 29, and Mahiedine Merabet, 35, who have been tried, since Thursday, January 5, for a project attack thwarted on the eve of the 2017 presidential election.
The two men got to know in early 2015 in prison. Two years later, on April 18, 2017, the police arrested them in an apartment in Marseille, in which they discovered 3.5 kg of explosives and four firearms. The target of this attack project could not be established with certainty; This question will be examined during debates on the merits. But, before coming to the facts, the court leaning, for two days, on the personality of the two accused, in order to understand the springs of their flight forward.
With her ironed white shirt, her black frame glasses, her carefully cut beard, her bulky vocabulary and her too polite notary’s tunes, Mahiedine Merabet opened the sequence on Thursday. As a introductory declaration, he has read a speech: “Please apologize in advance for my possible speech faults. Having a lot of difficulty in exteriorizing my thought in public, especially in solemn places like this- Ci, I decided to use the writing to free my thought from the yoke of emotion … “
Defense of rupture
The register of these first words surprises the audience. The accused is continuing, regularly throws out into the room to measure his effects: “I have no confidence in the justice of my country when questions relating to politics and war comes into play. How to qualify an institution that belongs to a power that leads a total war against an enemy on the military, informational and semantic level, if not political justice? I consider myself as a Muslim political prisoner. “
After setting the defense of breaking, Mahiedine Merabet refuses to answer questions from the Court on his biography. The portrait erected at the helm by the psychiatrist expert may offer a light on his posture: “He has relative self-confidence, but an overvalued self-esteem. He is concerned about his importance and wants to be at the center of the ‘Please note. He is in a flight forward: when he is in difficulty, he puts himself even more in difficulty … “
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