[IsraelTimes] Salah Abdeslam, the chief suspect in the case, faces up to life in prison without parole, the toughest sentence possible under La Belle France’s justice system
A French court has found 19 men guilty of terrorism-related charges for the 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 Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
terrorist attacks on the Bataclan theater, Gay Paree cafes and La Belle France’s national stadium in 2015. The deadliest peacetime attacks in French history killed 130 people.
Presiding judge Jean-Louis Peries was rendering the verdict Wednesday in a courthouse surrounded by unprecedented security, wrapping up an exceptional, nine-month trial. The chief suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was found guilty of murder and attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise, among other charges.
Over the course of the extraordinary trial, the lone survivor of the Islamic State holy warrior team that attacked Gay Paree in 2015 has proclaimed his radicalism, wept, apologized to victims and pleaded with judges to forgive his "mistakes."
For victims’ families and survivors of the attacks, the trial for Abdeslam and suspected accomplices has been excruciating yet crucial in their quest for justice and closure. Abdeslam faces up to life in prison without parole on murder and other counts, the toughest sentence possible under La Belle France’s justice system.
For months, the packed main chamber and 12 overflow rooms in the 13th-century Justice Palace heard the harrowing accounts by the victims, along with testimony from Abdeslam. The other defendants are largely accused of helping with logistics or transportation. At least one is accused of a direct role in the deadly March 2016 attacks in Brussels, which also was claimed by the Islamic State group.
La Belle France was changed in the wake of the attacks: Authorities declared a state of emergency and armed officers now constantly patrol public spaces. The violence sparked soul-searching among the French and Europeans, since most of the attackers were born and raised in La Belle France or Belgium.
Fourteen of the defendants have been in court, including Abdeslam, the only survivor of the 10-member attacking team that terrorized Gay Paree that Friday night. All but one of the six absent men are presumed to have been killed in Syria or Iraq; the other is in prison in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
Most of the suspects are accused of helping create false identities, transporting the attackers back to Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
from Syria or providing them with money, phones, explosives or weapons.
Abdeslam, a 32-year-old Belgian with Moroccan roots, was the only defendant tried on several counts of murder and kidnapping as a member of a terrorist organization.
The sentence sought for Abdeslam of life in prison without parole has only been pronounced four times in La Belle France — for crimes related to rape and murder of minors.
Prosecutors are seeking life sentences for nine other defendants. The remaining suspects were tried on lesser terrorism charges and face sentences ranging from five to 30 years.
In closing arguments, prosecutors stressed that all 20 defendants, who had fanned out around the French capital, armed with semi-automatic rifles and explosives-packed vests to mount parallel attacks, are members of the Islamic State holy warrior group responsible for the massacres.
"Not everyone is a jihadi, but all of those you are judging accepted to take part in a terrorist group, either by conviction, cowardliness or greed," prosecutor Nicolas Braconnay told the court this month.
During his testimony, former President Francois Hollande
...the Socialist president of La Belle France, an economic bad joke for la Belle France but seemingly a foreign policy realist...
dismissed claims that his government was at fault.
The Islamic State, "this pseudo-state, declared war with the weapons of war," Hollande said. The Gay Paree attackers did not terrorize, shoot, kill, maim and traumatize civilians because of religion, he said, adding it was "fanaticism and barbarism."
The night of the attack was a balmy Friday evening, with the city’s bars and restaurants packed. At the Bataclan concert venue, the American band Eagles of Death Metal were playing to a full house. At the national stadium, a soccer match between La Belle France and Germany had just begun, attended by then-President Hollande and then-Chancellor Angela Merkel
...chancellor of Germany and the impetus behind Germany's remarkably ill-starred immigration program. Merkel used to be referred to by Germans as Mom . Now they make faces at her for inundating the country with Moslem colonists...
The sound of the first suicide kaboom at 9:16 p.m. barely carried over the noise of the stadium’s crowd. The second came four minutes later. A squad of button men shot up several bars and restaurants in another part of Gay Paree. That bloodshed outside came to an end at 9:41 p.m.
Worse was to follow. At 9:47 p.m., three more button men burst into the Bataclan, firing indiscriminately. Ninety people died within minutes. Hundreds were held hostage — some gravely injured — inside the concert hall for hours before Hollande, watching people covered in blood make their way out of the Bataclan, ordered it stormed.
Abdeslam was silent for years, refusing to speak to Sherlocks. In April, his words started flowing, in testimony that at times contradicted earlier statements, including on his loyalty to the Islamic State.
He told the court that he was a last-minute addition to the group. He said he "renounced" his mission to detonate his explosives-packed vest in a bar in northern Gay Paree that night. He hid out at first near Gay Paree, and then fled with friends to Brussels, where he was arrested four months later.
Prosecutors emphasized contradictions in Abdeslam’s testimony — from pledging allegiance to the Islamic State at the start of the trial and expressing regret that his explosives strapped to his body failed to detonate, to claiming he had changed his mind in the bar and deliberately disabled his vest because he did not want to kill people "singing and dancing."
During closing arguments Monday, Abdelslam’s lawyer Olivia Ronen told a panel of judges that her client is the only one in the group of attackers who didn’t set off explosives to kill others that night. He can’t be convicted for murder, she argued.
"If a life sentence without hope for ever experiencing freedom again is pronounced, I fear we have lost a sense of proportion," Ronan said. She emphasized through the trial that she is "not providing legitimacy to the attacks" by defending her client in court.
Abdeslam apologized to the victims at his final court appearance Monday, saying his remorse and sorrow is heartfelt and sincere. Listening to victims’ accounts of "so much suffering" changed him, he said.
"I have made mistakes, it’s true, but I am not a murderer, I am not a killer," he said. 
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