The hearings for the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris ended this Monday, attacks in which 130 people died and 400 were injured. The five judges in charge of the process retired to a place whose location was not made public for security reasons to consider their verdicts. They are expected to report their decisions next Wednesday.
Before the judges retired to deliberate, the accused were heard, the last to speak was Salah Abdeslam, the only one of those directly accused of the attack, who asked for mercy, before the request for life imprisonment that weighs on him.
Abdeslam, in his final argument, assured that the judicial process and the life sentence with no possibility of reduction that is intended to be imposed on him are unfair, affirming that this sentence lives up to the facts but not to the people who are on the bench for not be directly responsible for the deaths.
“I recognize that I am not perfect, that I have made mistakes. But I am not a murderer. If they convict me of murder, they commit an injustice,” said the defendant.
The defendant affirmed that society condemns him because he has not been given his version of the role he played in the attacks, at which time he assures that he refused “for humanity” to activate the explosives belt that had been assigned to him, however the Prosecutors, citing the detainee’s previous statements, assure that the belt did not work because it had been defective.
“For public opinion he was on the terraces with a kalashnikov or he was in the Bataclan killing people. But you, Mr. President, know that the truth is that I did the opposite, ”said Abdeslam in his words to the court.
Abdeslam, who is French with a Moroccan family and grew up in Belgium, fled to Brussels, where he was arrested four months after the attacks. He initially claimed to be a soldier of the Islamic State and did not recognize the legitimacy of the court, but over the months he changed his attitude and began to show remorse and apologize to the victims.
“I want to present my apologies. Some will say that they are not sincere, that they are a strategy. As if a third party could know the sincerity of another. There are 130 deaths and 400 injuries, who can not be sincere with so much suffering?” said the 32-year-old defendant in his final words.
The others accused of the attacks in Paris
20 people are being prosecuted in court, of these, six are tried in absentia, as their whereabouts are unknown or it is presumed that they may be dead, the remaining 13, unlike the Franco-Moroccan, are accused of logistical support and Most of them apologized for what happened.
“I have put the face of the victims. I am aware that what happened is disgusting,” said Mohamed Abrini, a childhood friend of Abdeslam and who is accused of having provided weapons and logistics, who also said that he had originally been chosen for the group of 10 commandos that attacked Paris. , but gave up wearing the belt a few days before the events, prompting Abdeslam to take his place.
Sofien Ayari, another of those involved who also faces life imprisonment with at least 30 years to serve, expressed in his plea that he hopes that “never again, no one has to endure this suffering” and assured that the perpetrators were “fanatics who made extreme interpretations of religious texts.
Mohamed Bakkali, another of those accused of logistics issues, also apologized, as did the rest of the defendants who denied having knowledge of the intentions of those who hired them for various tasks. With tears in their eyes they asked the court for leniency.
For their part, Adel Haddadi and Muhammad Usman, who presumably remain firm in their convictions as members of the Islamic State, limited themselves to thanking their lawyers.
Reactions to the allegations
For Jean Reinhart, a lawyer for the 13onze15 Fraternité-Vérité victims’ association and the uncle of one of the victims who died at the Bataclan, Adeslam is a full and complete co-author of the events he is accused of.
However, Bruno Poncet, one of the survivors who was in the Bataclan concert hall during the attacks, declared the possibility that the words heard in the allegations were sincere.
“They will not forget the crimes they committed or helped (to commit), they did terrible things, but they are still people, so I imagine they were affected,” he said, while expressing his concern that the verdict will come out.
“There is some impatience for it to end. It is long, we put life on hold for 10 months, we try to get out intact. It took me 6 years to get out of the Bataclan, I came back for 10 months, that’s what we had to do and now we are very impatient It’s over. Now, justice must do its job. I really hope that these men are tried according to what they did and not according to the event itself, because the murderers are not on the stand,” Poncet said.
The trial, due to the number of plaintiffs it has had, which is close to 2,500; the number of victims; the duration and its emotional charge have made it one of the most important in the history of France.
With AFP and EFE
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