November 13 trial: new interrogation of Salah Abdeslam

Gwladys Laffitte with AFP 7:13 a.m., March 15, 2022

Talkative during his first interrogation a month ago, will Salah Abdeslam give new answers?

The main defendant in the trial of the November 13 attacks is again questioned on Tuesday, this time about his role in the preparations for the jihadist attacks.

The only member still alive of the commandos who killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis, remained silent during the five years of investigation, explained himself at length on February 9 for the first of his interrogations on the merits of the case.

Will Abdeslam sulk the audience? 

In front of a packed courtroom, the 32-year-old Frenchman had even advanced the schedule of the special assize court in Paris by a few weeks, suggesting on several occasions that he had "backtracked" and given up on action. his explosive belt on the evening of the attacks.

The interrogations on these final preparations and the evening of November 13, 2015 are only scheduled for the end of March.

In the meantime, the court must question him about all the logistics put in place by the jihadist cell from August 2015. Salah Abdeslam, who refused to appear all last week due, according to his defense, to "difficulties" linked to the change of police escort, will he still sulk the audience?

The questions to the main defendant should be numerous, his name having appeared in each of the presentations of the Belgian investigators heard from Brussels on the various preparatory acts for the attacks.

Convoy driver?

In particular, Salah Abdeslam is accused of having rented several cars under his real identity, which were used to find hideouts in Belgium and to travel from one cache to another.

He is also suspected of two trips to France to search for explosives.

Finally, Salah Abdeslam is charged with five convoys across Europe to pick up the future perpetrators of the attacks from Syria and transport them to Belgium.

The main defendant disputes some of these journeys, in particular the one that allowed the repatriation of the Bataclan "trio" in September 2015.

Faced with Belgian investigators, his lawyers questioned the "solidity" of the investigations, based mainly on telephony.

The accusation is based in particular on the lack of activity on his usual line during the various round trips and on the hypothesis that he used a dedicated telephone each time, with which he was in contact with a coordinator who remained in Belgium.

End of trial on June 24

But without these exchanges, without identity checks on the journeys, what are the "objective elements" to say that he was five times the driver of the convoy, asked the lawyers of Salah Abdeslam, Olivia Ronen and Martin Vettes.

In addition to Salah Abdeslam, the special assize court must also question Mohammed Amri on Tuesday.

Then will come the turns of their co-defendants.

Two of them, the Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Bakkali and the Swede Osama Krayem, have so far exercised their right to remain silent.

Two other phases of interrogation are expected before the end of the trial, scheduled for June 24.