Curious sensation, Tuesday, November 2, at the resumption of the trial of the attacks of November 13 before the special assize court of Paris: no one cried, no one mentioned his bullet wounds, nor the loss of a close to the Bataclan or on a Parisian terrace, nor his post-traumatic stress. After a month of hearing devoted to the horrors of the night of November 13, 2015 by those who suffered them, the floor is to the accused.
Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini, first. These two natives of Brussels are united by their proximity in alphabetical order, by their childhood in Molenbeek, where they were neighbors, and by a fate of former suicide candidate still alive. If things had gone as planned, the first would have activated, on the night of November 13, 2015, the explosive belt found intact three days later in a street south of Paris, and the second would have triggered, on March 22, 2016 , the bomb he was pushing on a luggage cart at Brussels airport.
They alone know why things did not go as planned, and the question was not put to them on Tuesday, since it is not the subject of the personality test that occupies the court this week. For the moment, it is a question of briefly retracing the course of the accused – childhood, family, schooling, professional life, detention -, without mentioning the charges weighing on each of them, which will be studied in January 2022.
Since there was no question of their radicalization or the facts with which they are accused, the two defective suicide bombers became again, Tuesday, the time of an interrogation, boys almost like the others. “You know, we did not come out of our mothers’ wombs with Kalashnikovs in hand”, said Mohamed Abrini. There was a life before the switch to terrorism.
“I was a good student”
Salah Abdeslam got up first. Had his lawyers called for restraint? Could it be that he was stirred by the endless distress of the civil parties? We won’t know, no one asked him, but defendant number one was no longer the same. We had known him vehemently and clumsily since the opening of the debates, worsening his case with each speech; he appeared calm and courteous on Tuesday, not very talkative but willingly answering questions. The discreet smile he sometimes displayed was not provocative. There was nothing mocking about the laughter that sometimes echoed in the courtroom. If we had not been at the trial of the attacks of November 13, we would have found the exchanges light.
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