The main accused seems to be torn between two identities that arouse misunderstanding: that of the “paver” he says to have been until the attacks, and that of the “fighter” he claims to be today.
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As at each of his interrogations, the Court of Assis’s Court of Assis’s Court of Paris fell again, impatient and feverish as in the first days of the trial. The civilian parts that had gradually deserted it over the twenty-one week of debates have regained their place on the benches. Salah Abdeslam, the only member still alive from the commandos of 13-November, polarizes all expectations. And every time disappoints. We expect him a stature he does not have, answers he says not to have. Yet he speaks, a lot, awkwardly, insolently, often aware of the incomprehension of the public.
The interrogation week that ends, devoted to the logistical preparation of the attacks, has been one of the most frustrating since the beginning of the trial, between defendants who do not remember and others who kept the silence. Salah Abdeslam, he spoke. On the banks of the civil parties, we were already beginning to fork when he said ignoring that the jihadists he went to Hungary in the summer of 2015 projected attacks: he thought he was helping “brothers” who flee the war in Syria. And it was enough of an unfortunate sentence on the “lives destroyed” of his co-accused, Tuesday, March 15, so that frustration explodes in a salvo of applause who has derailed the hearing and led to his suspension.
If Salah Abdeslam causes such an exasperation, it’s partly because of his double speech since the beginning of the trial. On the first day of hearing, in response to the President who asked him his profession, he launched, “Combating the Islamic State”. But to the question of whether he had lent allegiance to the Islamic state in the summer of 2015 when he convened the commandos to Brussels, he answered Wednesday: “No, I was not part of the Islamic state. I was in the same state of mind that the Ukrainians who live out of Ukraine and who support their compatriots (…). At that time, Abdeslam Salah is not the guy who wants to do Peter. I went to the casino, I had a girlfriend, all that … “
” I do not swing “
The “head of poster” of the trial of the attacks of 13-November is not the accomplished jihadist that he would like him to be, or even the one he claims to have become. There is a dissonance in its positioning, a trail, something that sounds false and causes embarrassment. On the one hand, his line of defense, his self-portrait of the summer of 2015: that of a “pairparte” embedded in spite of himself in a terrorist project that exceeds him; On the other, the image he seems to want to leave for posterity: that of a “fighter” fully assuming the ideology in whose name these attacks were committed.
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