On January 8, 2015, Laurent, then a municipal agent in Montrouge, saw with his own eyes Amédy Coulybaly gunning down policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe and injuring one of her colleagues.

He decides to grab the killer's weapon and will succeed in putting him to flight.

This Friday, during the trial of the attacks, his testimony allowed to learn more about the killer. 

"If I want to survive, I have to jump on him."

This Friday, during the day of the January 2015 bombings trial devoted to Clarissa Jean-Philippe, this municipal police officer shot dead by Amédy Coulibaly the day after the

Charlie Hebdo

massacre

,

 it is the testimony of a man who marked the spirits.

This man is called Laurent, and is then team leader of the cleaning service of the city of Montrouge.

Called to the scene of the upcoming drama for a banal traffic accident, he then crosses the path of the terrorist and confronts him with his bare hands. 

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"My only chance is to bump into him"

It is because the killer is sticking to him that Laurent notices him.

At 8:04 am this morning of January 8, 2015, Amédy Coulibaly takes out her weapon and shoots, Clarissa Jean-Philippe dies of a bullet in the throat and a colleague of the municipal agent is seriously injured in the jaw.

Believing at the beginning to a bad joke, Laurent shouts on the killer, then explains at the bar "going crazy" after seeing the "exploded head" of his colleague.

He then grabs the terrorist's assault rifle.

"If I turn my back on him and leave, he has enough distance to shoot me. So my only chance is to bump into him," he explains.

A phrase then turns in a loop in his head: "If you let go, you're dead".

A thought to which Amédy Coulibaly will respond verbally by throwing: "you want to play, you are going to die".

A violent altercation ensues and Laurent manages to tear off the terrorist's hood, found on the scene by the investigators who will formally identify Coulibaly thanks to his DNA. 

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"I doubt he had any compassion"

Kneeling in front of the "overarmed" and "determined" jihadist, Laurent still clings to the weapon.

"Holding one hand on the Kalashnikov, [Coulibaly] plunged his other hand into the jacket and pulled out an automatic pistol. He couldn't get rid of me, it annoyed him," he continues.

But the terrorist does not "finish" him.

On the contrary, he "turns around" and leaves "running".

"One of the hypotheses", recalls the Advocate General, "is that the weapon jammed and that he could not shoot".

"Yes, I doubt he had compassion," Laurent replies.

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A Jewish school real target of the terrorist?

For the latter, it is "clear from the start" that it was not Clarissa Jean-Philippe who was targeted, but "the Jewish school" Yaacov located just next to the scene of the accident.

"It was time to go back to class. A few minutes later, the door was closed. I had to mess up his timing," says Laurent.

"And then how could he have foreseen that there would be police officers? Coulibaly, it's not Madame Soleil." 

If this theory remains a hypothesis to this day, the next day, around 1 p.m., Amédy Coulibaly will burst into the Hyper Cacher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes in Paris, killing four men, all of them Jews.