Trial of the July 14 attack: "It's as if my heart was bleeding"
At the courthouse on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, the victims of the July 14 attack in Nice continue to take the stand.
AP - Francois Mori
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
At the trial of the July 14, 2016 attack in Nice, the hearings of the civil parties are entering their third week.
The court notably this Tuesday, September 26, Audrey, whose twin sister was killed in the attack on the truck.
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With our special correspondent at the Paris courthouse,
Laura Martel
“
We were like ass and shirt, we looked like two drops of water.
I was her intimate book and she was mine.
It was half of my life
, ”begins Audrey, her voice broken.
On July 14, 2016, she was 13 when her twin sister Laura was killed by Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel on the Promenade des Anglais.
His father, mother, older brother and sister
came to testify together last Wednesday
to recount their pain and how this tragedy had "
dislocated
" their family.
Audrey, she chose to file later and alone at the bar.
Of her twin sister, she keeps one last image: Laura and their mother proclaiming their love to erase an argument from the day before.
Then it's the truck.
The family manages to reunite, but Laura has disappeared.
As her parents search for her among the bodies, Audrey is taken home.
“
On the road, I had this inability to breathe, the impression of feeling his last breath.
She was my twin, when she wasn't well, I knew it and then I didn't feel her anymore.
It's as if my heart was bleeding
”.
But the teenager wants to keep hope and multiplies the calls to hospitals or on social networks.
After three days of unbearable waiting, she was summoned with her two eldest.
As they said before her on the stand, the announcement is brutal: “
The good news is that we have found your sister.
The bad news is that she is lifeless
”.
Collapsed, put under anxiolytics, Audrey is sent the next day to see her parents, mad with grief and hospitalized in psychiatry.
"
I hadn't taken a step when my mother yelled: '
Look, it's my daughter, it's Laura, she's not dead
.'
I understood that I couldn't stay
,” says Audrey.
In Laura's white coffin, at the bottom of this big hole, she says, she has placed her comforter.
And kept his sister's.
Six years later, between bulimia, suicidal thoughts and strained family relationships, Audrey admits having "
difficulty moving forward
".
But “I am 20 years old and living, for me, is not free, it is for her that I live”, asserts the young woman before launching: “
We have experienced the worst misfortune, but everything is still possible. .
Happiness doesn't just happen to others
.
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Nice attack