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2021-09-09 Europe
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Trial of 20 men accused in 2015 Paris terrorist attacks begins in France
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[EN.ALGHADEERTV.NET] A court trial began on Wednesday into the November 2015 terrorist attacks on Gay Paree, which left some 130 people killed and hundreds maimed when button men with boom jackets targeted six bars and restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall, and a sports stadium.Salah Abdeslam, the 31-year old French-Moroccan believed to be the only surviving member of the group suspected of carrying out the attacks, was among 20 men on trial.
| Mr. Abdesalam, a first generation Belgian who grew up in the notoriously Salafist Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, sharing with him a penchant for more or less petty criminality and Salafism that eventually evolved into active membership in ISIS. Abdesalam has refused to cooperate with the French investigation since his arrest and remained silent throughout a separate trial in Belgium in 2018 that got him a sentence of twenty years in Belgian prisons. Perhaps he will be silent again during his French trial. |
The attacks took place during the evening of November 13, 2015, and have left deep scars on the French national psyche.
Abdeslam is one of 20 men accused of involvement in the attacks. Dressed in black, he took his seat behind a reinforced glass partition in a purpose-built courtroom shortly before the long-awaited trial was due to start.
During the attack, button men with boom jackets attacked six bars and restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall, and a sports stadium.
Police were out in force to guard the Palais de Justice courthouse in central Gay Paree, and survivors and relatives of the victims said they were impatient to hear testimony that might help them better understand what happened and why it did so.
"It is important that the victims can bear witness, can tell the perpetrators, the suspects who are on the stand, about the pain," Philippe Duperron, whose 30-year-old son Thomas was killed in the attacks, told Rooters before the trial began.
"We are also awaiting anxiously because we know that as this trial takes place the pain, the events, everything will come back to the surface," said Duperron, who is the president of a victims’ association and will testify at the trial.
The trial will last nine months, with about 1,800 plaintiffs and more than 300 lawyers taking part in what Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti has described as an unprecedented judicial marathon.
Six of the 20 defendants will be tried in absentia. Most of them are believed to be dead.
Survivors and relatives of those killed said they hoped the trial would help them, and everyone, better understand what happened and why it happened — and hopefully avoid further attacks.
"What I care about in the trial is the testimony of other survivors, people who were in the terraces (that were targeted by the attackers), at the Stade de La Belle France, hear how they have been coping over the past six years," said 48-year-old Jerome Barthelemy. "As for the accused, I don’t even expect them to speak."
The last surviving member of the jihadist cell that massacred 130 people in Paris in November 2015 complains at the start of his trial that he and his fellow accused are being “treated like dogs.”
In a rant from the dock, four hours after the proceedings got underway, Salah Abdeslam shouts that he has “never complained because after death we will be resurrected.”
The last surviving assailant of the November 2015 attacks on Paris appeared in court on Wednesday at the start of a historic trial over the night of horror that sent shockwaves through France.
The suicide bombing and gun assaults by three teams of jihadists on bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the national stadium — planned in Syria and later claimed by the Islamic State group — left 130 people dead and around 350 physically injured.
The biggest trial in France’s modern history is expected to last nine months.
Only one of the 10 attackers survived.
Salah Abdeslam, a dual French-Moroccan national, was captured in Brussels after discarding his suicide vest and fleeing the French capital in the chaotic aftermath of the bloodshed.
After remaining silent for years during questioning by investigators, the 31-year-old gave evasive or provocative answers to basic questions at the start of the hearing, stating his Islamic faith when asked to identify himself.
Wearing a black T-shirt and sporting a long, black beard and swept-back hair, he then replied that he was a “fighter for the Islamic State” when asked for his profession.
The files for the trial run to one million pages bound in 542 volumes, detailing an investigation that revealed links between jihadist cells in Paris and Brussels, and their handlers in Syria.
Details of how the squad of killers managed to enter Europe undetected, using the flow of migrants from Islamic State-controlled regions of Syria as cover, is likely to be one of the areas of interest during proceedings.
As well as Abdeslam, the other 13 accused were present in court on charges ranging from providing logistical support to planning the attacks, as well as supplying weapons
They include Osama Krayem, a Swede whom Belgian investigators identified as one of the killers of a Jordanian pilot burnt alive in a cage by IS in early 2015 in Syria. He is also under investigation in Sweden for war crimes.
Of the six tried in absentia, five are presumed dead, mainly in airstrikes in Syria.
The horror was unleashed late on Friday, November 13, 2015, when the first attackers detonated suicide belts outside the Stade de France stadium where Hollande was watching France play a football match against Germany. A group of gunmen later opened fire from a car on half a dozen restaurants and Abdeslam’s brother Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up in a bar. The massacre culminated at the Bataclan. 
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Posted by Fred 2021-09-09 00:00||
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File under: Islamic State
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Posted by Skidmark 2021-09-09 07:03||
2021-09-09 07:03||
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