Court of Assizes specially composed, in Paris,
How Salah Abdeslam, such an ordinary man, “in a normal mood”, endowed with an “intellectual efficiency” which is just as much, could he participate in “such a project of mass destruction” ? This is the question that the two psychiatrists who assessed the last living member of the November 13 commandos tried to answer this Thursday, for nearly three hours. After having repeatedly refused to meet them, the latter finally agreed to comply with the exercise in November, two months after the start of the trial. “We have been confronted with the trivialization of evil, that is to say the enormous gap that exists between the enormity of the crimes and the banality of the personality of Salah Abdeslam”, immediately declared Daniel Zagury, star expert courtrooms, in front of an accused who remained impassive.
From the first minutes of their presentation, the experts brushed aside the thesis of a mental pathology to explain the participation of the Brussels resident in the attacks. “Salah Abdeslam did not suffer from any abolition of his discernment”, insisted his colleague, Bernard Ballivet. And if the prison administration well documented, in April 2017, a year after his incarceration, a delusional episode during which he seemed to hear voices and thought that the guards wanted to poison him, this one “can be linked to strict isolation” of his incarceration and disappeared when accommodations were put in place. “Participating in criminal projects does not require being seriously ill, nor being a major psychopath”, insists Daniel Zagury.
The attack, “a necessary evil”
However, note the experts, Salah Abdeslam’s commitment was “absolute”, his radicalization similar to “the vast majority of radicalized subjects”. Thus, they note, if he is not “insensitive to the suffering” of the civil parties, these are presented as “the consequence of an evil of which France is the origin”. Describing himself as a “soldier of the Islamic State”, the accused constantly, during their interview, presented the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis as a “necessary evil”. “The people who drank on the terrace of a café or those who took part in a concert were only the objectified representatives of a country to be fought and of a population to be terrorized”, they insist.
This “totalitarian” thought system, they explain, rids him of “any guilt or emotion.” Still, both note that Salah Abdeslam’s earlier personality is not deeply buried and occasionally peaks. “Oscillations” that they noted during their interview in November but which seem to have gained momentum during the last hearings. He who at the start of the trial multiplied the provocations, refused during the examination of the facts to answer the questions of the court, wiped away tears last Friday, asking forgiveness from the victims. “There was an almost prophetic dimension in your report,” underlines one of his two lawyers, Me Olivia Ronen.
“He risks being faced with a depressive collapse”
Is it a defense strategy or a real evolution in his personality, questions the court? Who is the real Salah Abdeslam, the “Islamic State fighter” as he presented himself on the first day of the trial or the man who asked forgiveness from the victims, saying he had given up blowing himself up out of humanity ? “What appears as lies, contradictions are perhaps only the existence of several registers in the same personality”, assures Daniel Zagury, warning against the risk of locking him in a box.
According to the expert, however, it appears “measured and objective” to affirm that Salah Abdeslam was able to “evolve into something less closed and less constrained” during these eight months of hearing. It remains to be seen if there is awareness, the accused could bear it: without his ideological straitjacket could he support being confronted with the crimes for which he is tried? “He risks being confronted with a depressive collapse”, assure the experts.