[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] A suspected ISIS jacket wallah accused of being a key member of an attack on Gay Paree, in which 130 people died, today told a packed courtroom he should not be sent to prison for the rest of his days because 'I didn't kill or wound anyone'. Salah Abdeslam,
| ...the only surviving button man of the Paris attackers — because his suicide vest failed to blow up — the boy who ran with all the other petty criminals in the notoriously Salafist Molenbeek neighbourhood until he grew up to transfer that sense of entitlement to membership in ISIS has already been sentenced in Belgium in a separate trial. It appears he has abandoned the habit of silence that got him twenty years for that one... |
But the French Moroccan national on Wednesday said he had deliberately pulled out of the November 2015 rampage in which other faceless myrmidons including his brother were blown to pieces.
And he insisted he was now being 'made an example of' and did not deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison.
'I want to say today that I didn't kill anyone, and I didn't hurt anyone,' Abdeslam told a specialist court set up at the Palais de Justice in central Gay Paree.
'It's important for me to say this, because since the beginning of this case, people have not stopped slandering me.'
Abdeslam added: 'In the future, when someone gets into an underground train or a bus with a suitcase stuffed with 50 kilogrammes of explosives, and at the last minute decides 'I'm not doing this,' he will know that he can't, because otherwise he will be locked away or killed.'
Abdeslam has in the past described himself as a 'soldier with Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
' and part of the 'commando unit' that attacked the Stade de La Belle France national sport stadium, six restaurants and bars, and the Bataclan music hall.
He is now one of 20 defendants facing various charges related to the attacks, in a mammoth trial — the biggest in French history — that began in September.
Prosecutors allege that Abdeslam's explosive vest malfunctioned and that he then bravely ran away from the French capital in the hours after the Friday 13thattack.
In court today, Abdeslam denied ever having gone abroad from his home in Belgium to fight or train with ISIS.
He admitted being a 'member of Islamic State', adding 'I support IS, I am for them, I love them.'
But he said he was 'not initially motivated by religion,' but instead wanted to oppose Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
'I knew that the Syrians were suffering and I was in comfort, busy enjoying life while they were being massacred, I felt guilty,' he said.
Fourteen suspects are in the dock in Gay Paree, with six others being tried in their absence, five of them presumed dead in Iraq or Syria and the last in prison in
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...Abdeslam is alleged to have been central to the international logistics operation that underpinned the ISIS attack.
He is believed to have escorted the three bombers who blew themselves up at the Stade de La Belle France in Gay Paree.
Abdeslam, 32, reiterated his claim of belonging to the Islamic State group, saying he pledged allegiance to the group "48 hours before the attacks" — though later claiming he had pledged "without even knowing it."
‘ROAD TRIP’
Abdeslam has so far largely refused to answer Sherlocks’ questions since his March 2016 arrest in Belgium, where police found him after months of searching for the men behind the massacres.
He has claimed he discarded his boom jacket and fled the French capital in the chaotic aftermath of the bloodshed, eluding an intense manhunt to return to Molenbeek, the Brussels district where he grew up.
The questioning focused initially on Abdeslam’s background and events before the attacks. Prosecutors have already established that he spent much of his youth as a pot-smoking fan of nightclubs and casinos.
Yet as questioning began by presiding judge Jean-Louis Peries, Abdeslam often gave offhand answers that verged on insolence.
Asked about a suspiciously short trip to Greece a few months before the attacks with one of his co-defendants, where Sherlocks say they might have met IS operatives, Abdeslam said it was just a "road trip."
"We stopped in Italia, ate pasta, then went to Greece and visited some islands and that’s it," he said.
"You think everything is linked to the Islamic State, but people also have a social life."
He also claimed he learned only months after that his brother Brahim, who detonated his suicide belt in a bar during the Friday night attack in Gay Paree, had traveled to Syria in early 2015.
Abdeslam’s mother, sister and ex-fiancée had also been scheduled to take the stand on Wednesday, but the presiding judge informed the court that they would not be coming, without giving further details.