Do we have to show everything to show ? The only Does the witness account make it possible to account for the reality of a crime? If these questions appear, at first glance, a tad philosophical, they summarize the case of conscience confronting the specially composed Assize Court. Since the opening of the trial of the November 13 attacks, a decision has been taken not to broadcast images of crime scenes, in particular so as not to rekindle the trauma of the victims. Killings, so we saw plans with dots, stars or numbers to materialize, here the dead, there the wounded. For nearly an hour, we scrutinized a photo of the Bataclan, empty, taken long after the rehabilitation work, while an investigator detailed who had died where. Rare exceptions: the projection of poor quality images of Brahim Abdeslam blowing himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire and a shot of bodies stretched out, covered with colored sheets, in front of the Belle Equipe.
The question, however, is far from settled. And many are those, including among the civil parties, to ask the court to review its position. “After five weeks of such harsh testimony, do we still need to take these precautions? I wonder if it would not bring to the debates to show certain things, perhaps a few images, from afar ”, questioned at the end of last week at the bar Arthur Dénouveaux, the president of the association of victims Life for Paris, himself at the Bataclan on the evening of November 13th. And to insist: “You just have to type in Google” Bataclan pit “to see horrible things. It would perhaps be strange, in nine months of trial, not to see anything… ”The president of the Assize Court, Jean-Louis Périès, nods, admits having asked himself the question. “We will think about it, we still have a few months ahead of us …”
Add “horror to horror”
Generally, during assize trials, snapshots of crimes are broadcast to the court, but can it be the same in terrorism trials? The debate is not new, it arose in particular last year during the trial of the January 2015 attacks. The president of the Assize Court then accepted the dissemination of photos of the findings of the killing perpetrated in the premises of Charlie hebdo. Despite the magistrate’s warning, the images, of unheard-of violence, had frozen the assembly, prompting many civil parties to hastily leave the room. A few days later, the same president announced that he had decided not to broadcast images of the Hyper Cacher, in particular those shot by the terrorist himself. “They are not useful for the manifestation of the truth. There is no point in adding horror to horror, ”he said.
Exhibiting corpses, showing the impact of bullets and blood, does it help to promote “the manifestation of the truth”, as the saying goes? Are the images more powerful than the 400 or so testimonies of the civil parties? Even without having the photos in front of you, these stories made it possible to reconstruct the film of the killings, almost pixel by pixel, the reality of these attacks. If we did not see the mass grave of the Bataclan, the descriptions of the bodies entangled for nearly “a meter” in the middle of the pit, of the blood which flooded the ground from the start of the attack – “how it was. possible that he has so many, instantly? “, Asks Hans – the evocations of the groans of pain and the last sighs of the victims made it possible to visualize it. But is it enough to realize a crime? The testimonies, even if they overlap with each other, remain subjective. The photo shows reality at a given moment.
“Showing these images makes the victims suffer, the executioners enjoy”
The question is all the more difficult because it is not unanimous. Succeeding at the helm from Arthur Dénouveaux, Philippe Duperron, president of the association 13Onze15 Fraternité et Vérité, whose son died at Bataclan, was more skeptical. “I am convinced that all these testimonies, this horror, this pain in rebuilding oneself, make it possible to take the measure, even more than the images and the sound, of the devastation and participate even more in the appreciation of the proportionality of the penalties”, he asserted.
Questioned on this point by the court, the psychiatrist Thierry Baubet was also unfavorable. “Showing these images makes the victims suffer, the executioners enjoy pleasure, and never allows those who were not there to imagine what has been lived. “
“It adds to the testimonies”
Would an intermediate solution be to reproduce the crime scene through audio? The Bataclan attack was recorded entirely by a spectator who originally sought to capture the concert with a dictaphone. A few days after the opening of the trial, the court had decided to broadcast the first 30 seconds of the attack, when the bursts of Kalashnikovs had come to interrupt the musicians. A few seconds which made it possible to grasp the suddenness of the attack, more difficult its intensity. At the end of last week, at the request of Arthur Dénouveaux, the president accepted the broadcast of another part of the recording, approximately 5 minutes after the start of the attack.
The hubbub of the beginning has given way to absolute silence, only the voices of the terrorists resound. The latter no longer shoot in a burst but piecemeal. The courtroom is seized, almost in apnea, listening to these 5 minutes. To their captive victims, the jihadists order to get “on the ground”. “The first who gets up, I shoot”, “the first who moves, I put a bullet in his head”, “the hour of revenge to strike”. Injunctions sometimes followed by shots. On multiple occasions, in an almost playful tone, they attack François Hollande. “You can thank your president. The excerpt broadcast that day ends with the explosion of the belt of one of the three terrorists, hit by the shooting of a BAC commissioner. “It adds to the testimonies,” comments Arthur Dénouveaux. It allows us to realize in a different way how horrible it was. It’s hard to say otherwise.