They cared for ISIS, not Qur’an
She was but one of the survivors, a woman who with her husband had cowered in a store while Islamist State terrorists ran amok in Paris. Literally inches away from a shooter.
In the witness stand the other day, she recalled messaging her daughter. “We love you. Please don’t call.”
Because the assailants were turning their automatic weapons in the direction of every ringing phone, every terrified sob, every pained moan.
Then she asked the court for permission to speak directly to the accused, warning that it wouldn’t be polite.
“F--- you!”
It was a singular expression of rage and contempt in the custom-built courtroom inside the massive complex of the Palais de Justice where, in the 18th century, Marie Antoinette was tried by a Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned to the guillotine for high treason.
None of the 14 defendants in the box — six others are being tried in absentia, five of them believed to have been killed in Syria — will ever be executed, if found guilty. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
It is being described as France’s “trial of the century,” not just a proceeding for justice, but an occasion to assuage trauma, to heal, for a nation deeply scarred by horror. In its own way, a psychological bloodletting.
Six years it’s taken to bring the suspects to judicial reckoning for the massacre and carnage unleashed in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. Co-ordinated attacks by 10 gunmen and suicide bombers who struck within minutes of one another at various locations around the City of Light: The national stadium where French president François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were watching a soccer match between their countries; the Bataclan theatre where California rock band Eagles of Death Metal was playing for an audience of 1,500; a series of bistros and restaurants where happy crowds, many out on patios, were enjoying a warm autumn evening — Le Carillon, Café Bonne Bière, La Belle Équipe, La Casa Nostra, Comptoir Voltaire.
Gunmen shouted “Allahu akbar!” before emptying their guns and detonating their vests. Civilians hid in cupboards, crawled into the ceiling, played dead even as cartridge shells rained down around them, even as they watched life drain from the eyes of the slain.
Eleven months after the murderous rampage on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Paris was plunged into another catastrophic episode of violence in the deadliest strike against France since the Second World War, among the worst terror attacks to hit the West — 130 innocents slain, hundreds more wounded.
Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers.
Hours later, as investigators secured eight crime sites, what they would remember were all the cellphones still trilling — relatives and friends desperately trying to make contact with loved ones.
And the severed limbs, the mangled bodies, the sticky pools of blood underfoot.
In court, they’ve recalled all that, too, one gendarme so shattered by the landscape of death that he’d spend a month in a psychiatric hospital.
“It is not over and I do not know whether it ever will be,” he testified. “I saw a human trunk cut in two, pieces of flesh everywhere.
“When I got home, my shoes and clothes were full of blood.”
This from a police officer who arrived at the Bataclan — 90 people killed there — hours afterward: “We walked through coagulated blood, amid splinters of bones and flesh and phones that vibrated. And in the midst of corpses, corpses, corpses.”
The trial, which began in September and is expected to run for nine months, started with the lead judge — it’s a panel of three presiding — sombrely reading aloud a four-hour summary of the event. Five weeks have been set aside for testimony from survivors and those who lost loved ones. That phase is now underway.
What’s most remarkable is the tragic dignity of these witnesses as they try to convey both grief and incomprehension: Why?
“How does one become a murderer?” the mother of a dead child asked. “At what moment do things shift? I’d like to understand.”
The prevailing emotion seems more sadness than anger, or maybe the passage of time has gentled the wrath. A professional rugby player who’d thrown himself over his sister at a restaurant and was shot three times in the leg — five ribs and an ankle pulverized by machine gunfire — said he had no anger against anyone.
“I wonder how they could have done what they did, but I’m determined to send out a strong message: I’m living for those that I heard die that night.”
From another, also wounded: “I refuse to lapse into a life of hatred.” Glancing at the accused: “Hatred sticks to you. With all due respect, gentlemen, I will not have you in my head.”
Although a vast quantity of phone and CCTV video is available, the tribunal has allowed only a tiny bit of footage to be shown in court.
A mother who lost both her twin daughters at the Carillon, described the girls as “against racism, sectarianism and intolerance. They were easy targets. All that’s left is some photographs and the memories. I don’t understand.”
It’s unlikely they will find answers in this proceeding, even when defendants take the stand (if they do, but how can they resist the stage) next year.
Despite the anguish they’ve had to absorb, will live with for the rest of their days, many have testified with a simple and graceful eloquence, directing their words to the men in the box. And some, Muslims themselves, have reproached the defendants for their savage jihadist corruption of Islam.
“The first thing we learned,” one witness told them, “was not to kill, certainly not women and children.”
From another, who was seriously injured at the stadium, accused them of ignorance about Islam. “These people have invented a religion of their own.
“They are a shame to real Muslims.”
A woman, who described how she’d been frozen in her seat at a table in the rear of a café close to a girl who’d slumped over dead: “I expect no miracles from this trial. I feel no hatred. Just a profound sadness.”
But there were miracles that night; a man shot 32 times survived.
A Muslim man who lost two sisters at La Belle Équipe, testified how he prayed when the shooting started.
“I pray to the same God as you.”
A woman whose sister had been killed in a hail of bullets as they sat in a car outside the Carillon, said: “The people who did this are not Muslims. Our version of Islam says it is wrong to kill.”
Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the terrorist cell responsible for the attack and thus the key defendant, has refused to speak with investigators, but at that point asked for permission to address the court, which he was granted.
“Our targets were the unbelievers,” the 32-year-old announced. “If we killed Muslims, it was not our intention. I just want to tell the witness that we were not after Muslims and that, if her sister is dead, it was an accident.”
Abdeslam was the 10th attacker among the suicide squads, all the rest, including his brother, either shot dead by police or dead from blowing themselves up. It is believed Abdeslam intended to commit suicide as well, but his explosives vest — police later found it — was defective.
Instead, Abdeslam, a French-Moroccan national, escaped to his hometown, Brussels, captured 126 days later after a shootout in the city’s suburbs. Most of the attackers were either French or Belgian.
Charged with participation in terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist organization (the others face lesser charges for abetting and providing assistance), Abdeslam has already been convicted of attempted murder, resulting from the shootout.
Police in Belgium allege he was also part of an ISIS cell that killed 32 people in an attack on Brussel’s airport and subway system eight months before the Paris atrocity.
Abdeslam’s defence team in Belgium quit the case because their client would hardly speak to them. Sven Mary, one of his former counsel, told reporters: “He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray. He’s extremely vacuous.
“I asked him if he had read the Qur’an and he replied that he had researched it on the internet.”
Since this trial began, Abdeslam, who’s refused to be interrogated, has repeatedly interrupted proceedings to yell and harangue from behind the protective glass. Early in the trial, he shouted: “François Hollande knew the risks he was taking in attacking the Islamic State in Syria,” referring to the former president who’d authorized strikes against ISIS.
“We fought France. We attacked France. We targeted the civilian population,” Abdeslam added.
“It was nothing personal against them.”
This is believed to have been their motivation.
It doesn’t have to make sense. It only has to instill fear.