A French court found guilty on Wednesday (29) of all 20 accused of the murder of 130 people in the 2015 terrorist attacks in and around Paris, the most serious attacks in the French capital since World War II. The attacks took place on November 13, 2015 at the Bataclan concert hall, in six bars and restaurants and in the vicinity of the Stade de France stadium and left 130 dead.
Only one of those accused of carrying out the attacks, however, is alive. It is Salah Abdeslam, 32, who was found guilty on terrorism and murder charges and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of further sentence, a sentence that has been carried out only four times in France.
Born in Belgium, he was proud at the beginning of the trial to be a soldier of the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks. The accused, however, did not plead guilty and said that at the last minute he chose not to detonate the explosive vest he was carrying. But court investigations pointed out that the vest did not actually explode because it was defective, the indictment says.
After almost ten months of trial, on Monday (27), the last day of hearings, Abdeslam returned to defend himself. “I am not a murderer and if I am convicted of murder you will do an injustice,” he said, before apologizing to the survivors and victims’ relatives, who packed the Paris Palace of Justice for the verdict to be read.
He was arrested in Belgium on March 18, 2016, days before new attacks, this time on the Brussels metro, left 32 dead.
Another 13 defendants, ten of whom are in prison, were heard during the trial. Some of them took responsibility for the deaths and apologized. The court found them guilty of a range of crimes, including planning the attacks or assisting the executioners with weapons and cars. In addition to them, six people who allegedly already died were sentenced in absentia.
“I’m going to turn a huge page and after that, life will start again. That’s for sure. There will be a later one,” Aurélie Silvestre, who lost her companion in the Bataclan and whose trial allowed her to “digest the drama,” told Libération newspaper. “.
Arthur Denouveaux, a Bataclan survivor, stated that the trial had exceeded the victims’ expectations “because the terrorists spoke, the terrorists responded in a way to our testimonies, that was so unexpected, it never happens in terrorist trials.” “I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved,” he said, who chairs the victims’ association.
The sentences against the 20 accused range from two years in prison to life in prison without parole for Abdeslam and two former leaders of the Islamic State group, who were considered dead in the region of Syria and Iraq. Life imprisonment was applied in very few cases in France. Since it was established in 1994, it had only been used for those convicted of killing children, after raping and torturing them.
The attacks took place against the backdrop of a series of attacks by Islamic fundamentalists in Europe, as an international coalition fought the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Since then, a series of smaller-scale knife and firearm attacks in France have kept the terrorist threat in the spotlight, prompting authorities to expand anti-extremism legislation.
The 2015 attack traumatized France and continues to shape national debates about French identity, the place of Muslims in a country that identifies as secular, and the balance between individual freedom and collective security.
It was a unique trial, not only for its exceptional length of 10 months, but also for the time the court devoted to allowing victims to testify in detail about what they went through while the families of the dead spoke of how difficult it was to move on.
