To the specially constituted Court of Appeal,
A great first for the specially constituted Assize Court. As now permitted by law, “the debates will be recorded”, announces the president, Emmanuelle Bessone. While the bailiff turns on the camera, an interpreter translates into Arabic the words of the magistrate to the accused, confined to his wheelchair since he was injured during his arrest. Black hair, very short haircut, gray shirt, mustache, Hamou Benlatreche, a 42-year-old Algerian, is on appeal for “terrorist assassination attempt”. At first instance, this former VTC driver had been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment with a security sentence of twenty years, for having driven his car into a group of soldiers participating in Operation Sentinel, in Levallois (Hauts- de-Seine) in August 2017. Six of them were injured, two of them seriously.
“Do you now recognize the facts or are you still contesting them? asks the president after summarizing the facts. “I don’t recognize anything you said,” replied the accused through the voice of his interpreter. Hamou Benlatreche, who suffers from a serious malformation of the blood vessels of the brain, has always claimed that it was an accident. According to him, he was driving his BMW 2 Series Gran Tourer looking for customers when around 8 a.m., he fell ill at Place de Verdun. “I lost consciousness at the Porte de Champerret, and moreover I broke the windshield of my vehicle. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the soldiers on the road. I wanted to turn around but I was afraid they would shoot at me. I continued the road. I did not stop, ”he explained to the investigating magistrate.
“The look of someone who wanted to fight it out”
Hamou Benlatreche then flees by taking a street in the opposite direction. His vehicle, equipped with a geolocation system, is a few hours later in the North of France, traveling on the A16 motorway. BRI police officers from Rouen and Lille, dispatched to the scene, surrounded him to force him to stop near Calais (Pas-de-Calais). But the accused refuses to comply and cut off contact. Fearing that he seized a weapon or set off an explosive device, officials opened fire on him a dozen times. Hamou Benlatreche was hit with five bullets, notably in the chest, right arm and left shoulder. A bullet will be found lodged in the spine.
But his explanations are struggling to convince justice, which has always considered that it was a terrorist attack. Two experts have indeed concluded that his version of the facts, which occurred in the midst of a wave of jihadist attacks in France, “was not plausible from a medical point of view”. On the other hand, the images captured by the city’s surveillance cameras show that he was driving at a slow pace then that he accelerated suddenly while moving to the right in the direction of the soldiers. The victims also assure that he had not lost consciousness: they well remember having perceived “the look of someone who wanted to fight it out”.
Disturbing research on the Internet
The investigation also revealed that Hamou Benlatreche had scouted the scene three days earlier. The investigating judge noted in his indictment that “the use of a ram vehicle to mow down pedestrians was recommended as early as 2010 in the magazine Inspired Al-Qaeda, and specifically responds to Mohammed al-Adnani’s September 22, 2014 call to kill Westerners by any means”.
His relatives described to investigators a very practicing Muslim who was “not at all radicalized”. On the other hand, some found it “weird”, a little “disturbed”. By exploiting the phones and computer equipment seized during the searches, the police discovered several disturbing elements. Hamou Benlatreche had considered going to Turkey, looked at the map of a Syrian city on Google Maps, consulted pages entitled: “When is it lawful to kill a Muslim? /The appeal of belief”, “the cases in which it is lawful to kill in Islam”, “what is the verdict for the one who kills an unbeliever”. They also found several photographs related to Daesh. Finally, several of his contacts had already appeared in files of a terrorist nature.
Before the facts, Hamou Benlatreche had no criminal record. He has since been convicted for several incidents that occurred in custody. The trial is scheduled until February 17. Hamou Benlatreche faces life imprisonment.