At the November 13 trial, the other lives of the accused
Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Amri, on the third day of the interrogations of the accused, November 4, 2021. AFP - BENOIT PEYRUCQ
Text by: François-Damien Bourgery Follow
7 mins
For four days, the defendants at the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 were questioned about their path before the attacks, in a balancing act where the substance of the case should not be discussed.
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From our special envoy to the Paris courthouse,
They had ended up becoming an indistinct mass.
Fourteen figures seated between a row of uniforms and two of black dresses, of which only the bust and the upper part of the face could be seen.
They had been heard on the first day of the hearing declining their identity, then on the sixth when the president of the special assize court Jean-Louis Périès had offered them to say a few words.
And for a month and a half, apart from a few scandals, we hadn't heard them at all.
Attention was focused on the heart of the courtroom where the victims of the Stade de France, the terraces and the Bataclan recounted their evening of November 13, 2015.
►
To read also: Infographic - Who are the individuals involved in the attacks of November 13
This week, the fourteen men each rose to the call of the president.
The three who appear free presented themselves at the bar;
the other eleven remained in their cubicles.
They took off their masks and the audience was able to discover them in their singularity.
She saw the shaved hair and full beards of
Salah Abdeslam
and Sofien Ayari, the carefully trimmed one of Mohamed Bakkali, the cheeks of Hamza Attou red with emotion and the pale features of Ali Oulkadi.
She saw them concentrated, fixing their interlocutor straight in the eyes, their hands resting on the edge of the box and the body leaning forward as if to face the questions, or else leaning casually against a pillar.
An exercise in humanization
“
We have a small window of a few hours during which we talk about your personality and then after that we won't talk about it at all. So we take advantage of it,
”explained Me Xavier Nogueras, Mohamed Amri's lawyer. For the defendants, the exercise often consisted of answering the semi-open questions of the magistrates and of seizing the poles stretched out by their defenders. It was nonetheless essential: it was a question of humanizing the portrait painted by the investigation file in which the fourteen men appear, to varying degrees, for their alleged role in the attacks of November 13th. So they spoke at length. The Swede Osama Krayem spoke in Arabic, the Pakistani Muhammad Usman in Urdu, and all the others in French, sometimes with a Belgian accent.
In turn, they recounted a "
simple
", "
happy
"
childhood
,
often with many siblings. Adel Haddadi described a youth "
full of love
", until his brother sank into alcohol and started beating him. "
We felt the emptiness of the father,
" said Ali El Haddad Asufi of his, who died when he was six years old. The fourteen men spoke of their youth, holidays in Morocco or Kabylia, football or cricket games, and shortened studies. “
A youthful mistake,
conceded Mohamed Amri who stopped his three years before the baccalaureate.
But it's never too late to start again.
Some of them have taken theirs back in prison.
Like Mohamed Bakkali, who obtained a degree in sociology there.
“
It allowed me to make my understanding of things more complex
,” he explained.
►
To read also: Trial of November 13: "We were not born with a Kalashnikov"
In turn, they also detailed professional career ups and downs. The odd jobs sometimes supplemented by more or less legal activities - for one, the breeding of goldfinches; for another, counterfeiting; for a third, retail drug sales. Farid Kharkhach described his prosperous life in Morocco which he abandoned for a woman and a succession of setbacks in Belgium. Mohamed Amri spoke about his activity within the Samu social meeting the homeless. A few have also confessed to addictions. Cannabis, gambling. Salah Abdeslam, for his part, tried to convey the smoothest possible image of him, which a civil party lawyer summed up in one sentence: “
A normal childhood, not rogue, some deviations not premeditated.
""
Yes, it's true,
”replied calmly the sole survivor of the November 13th commandos.
Referred by their lawyers, the fourteen men also told about their life in detention.
These brothers and these friends who no longer want to see them.
“
An evil for a good,
according to Farid Kharkhach.
We know the true nature of people.
The first words and the first steps of a son which they did not attend.
The medical care they are denied.
The tiny cells they suffocate in in the summer.
The walking lessons in which they feel "
like a hamster
" and from which they can barely guess the sky.
The insults of the supervisors who hurt like "
stab wounds in the heart
".
The objects that end up becoming the only friends.
So much so that the president of the court felt the need to recall the problem of overcrowding in French prisons.
"
Verbalizing what we live in isolation does not conflict with what the victims experienced
," warned
Mohamed Bakkali
.
“
Whether we like it or not, humans are social beings.
If we take away his sociability, we take away his humanity.
"
"We'll see that later"
Between these former lives and these lives in detention, lawyers and magistrates played the tightrope walk, in a balancing act where neither the charges nor the religious aspect were to be addressed. There was therefore no question of the religiosity of Abdellah Chouaa's father and the influence he could have exerted on him, nor of a trip to Germany that Hamza Attou and Mohamed Amri would have made together. "
We'll see that later,
" cut President Jean-Louis Périès. "
We'll see that later,
" he said when a lawyer for the civil parties noticed that Mohamed Bakkali was in Egypt at the same time as Mohammed Merah, the terrorist from Toulouse and Montauban. "
We'll see that later
He repeated when another wondered about the way Mohammad Usman and Adel Haddadi exchanged since no one speaks the same language.
Some, more skilful perhaps, have nevertheless managed to touch the bottom of the file.
Like this lawyer who asked Salah Abdeslam if he continued to play chess.
"
I stopped when I learned that it was forbidden by Islam,
" replied the person, suggesting his path to radicalization.
Or this representative of the prosecution who questioned Yassine Atar at length about a possible nickname - "Yass".
Very comfortable until then, the accused suddenly tensed.
And for good reason: “Yass” is the title of an audio message discovered in the computer of Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the suicide bombers of the Brussels attacks in March 2016.
Above all, the four days of interrogation made it possible to dive into the room of the “Béguines”, the café that Brahim Abdeslam kept in Molenbeek. It is here that Hamza Attou obtained his cannabis resin, before gradually becoming the trusted man of the eldest of the Abdeslam brothers, described according to the people questioned as a "
friend
", "
a very good friend
", the “
favorite
”
brother
, but also as a boss who knew how to show authority. It is also in this cafe that Mohamed Amri worked as a bartender. "
I was fed, I had my free cannabis consumption and 50-70 euros per day
», He said.
This is also where Ali Oulkadi smoked joints while playing cards and chess with the Abdeslam brothers.
It was also at the "Beguines" that jihadist propaganda was seen.
But "
we'll see that later
".
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