Alleged terrorist's lawyer faces daunting mission

PARIS • Salah Abdeslam was watching a documentary about French jihadists when his eye was caught by the young defence lawyer representing the fighters.

From his maximum-security prison, the alleged terrorist decided that he needed to hire Olivia Ronen, too.

After meeting Abdeslam, Ronen accepted the daunting mission: to defend the actions of France's public enemy No. 1. Ronen, who at 31 is the same age as her client, has worked with high-profile terror suspects before. However, the alleged mastermind of the 2015 Paris attacks poses a new challenge.

Since he was arrested in Belgium in 2016, Abdeslam has stayed silent in the courtroom.

“My silence does not make me a criminal, it is my defence,” he told a court in Brussels.

His reluctance to communicate with the court led several of his lawyers to quit.

“He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray ... he's extraordinarily vacuous,” said Sven Mary, one of those former lawyers.

“I asked him if he had read the Koran, and he replied that he had researched it on the Internet,” he added.

Ronen, however, told French media that Abdeslam was “able to communicate.”

The lawyer attracted public attention three years ago, when she defended former soldier Erwan Guillard, who had gone to Syria to fight with the Islamic State group.

Another of her clients, who had been suspected of involvement in the deadly terror attack that rocked Nice in 2016, committed suicide while in prison.

Ronen often gets asked how she can defend “the indefensible.”

“I always try to make people understand that even people who are labelled terrorists are common people, people like us who, at one point, go off the rails.”