Il trial for the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris ended with the conviction of the 20 defendants, 19 of whom were found guilty of all the charges against them. In particular, Salah Abdeslam, the only first-person participant in the attacks still alive, was found guilty of “murders in organized gang, in connection with a terrorist organization” and was sentenced to harsher penalty provided for by French law: a form of life imprisonment that provides for the possibility of parole only after 30 years of detention. Since 1994, French justice has imposed this penalty only four times.
Begun on 8 September last, this process was the largest that has taken place in France since the war: it concerned the attacks carried out by ISIS on the Bataclan theater, the Stade de France and in some premises of the 10th and 11th arrondissements, two districts of the French capital, in which 130 people died and more than 400 were injured. About 1,800 people of twenty different nationalities had filed a civil action.
During the Abdeslam trial, which is now 32 years old, he defended himself saying he did not kill or injure anyone: he always claimed to have chosen to abandon the explosive belt he had with him, giving up blowing himself up like the other members of the commando. The belt in question had been found in a garbage can by investigators: the Special Court of Assizes of Paris – the court before which the trial took place – however considered that the belt did not work because it was defective, questioning the defense of Abdeslam.
Abdeslam had said that he had decided to support ISIS only after the western states had carried out bombings in Syria; he also said that his brother and best friend, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian-Moroccan believed to be the organizer of the Paris attacks who was killed in France a few days later, had gone to Syria to fight the Bashar al Assad regime, but Western bombing had prompted them to join ISIS and plan attacks in Europe.
The attacks of November 13, 2015 began with that at the Stade de France, the main stadium in Paris, where a friendly football match was being played between the national teams of France and Germany, which was also attended by the then president of the French Republic. , François Hollande: there were two explosions and one death. A few minutes later in the city center, a second commando, consisting of three terrorists armed with assault rifles, began shooting people sitting in two rooms between the 10th and 11th arrondissements, the Carillon Café and the Petit Cambodge, near Rue Alibert, and then in the restaurants of Rue de Charonne: they killed 36 people. At 9.41 pm, a few kilometers further south, an attacker single-handedly struck the Comptoir Voltaire brasserie, firing his explosive belt and wounding about fifteen people, but killing only himself.
Meanwhile at the Bataclan, a 1,500-seat concert hall, Eagles of Death Metal, a well-known California rock band, were playing. The attack began at 9.47pm. After shooting some people who were smoking and a security officer, the third commando, made up of three terrorists, climbed onto a raised floor between the stalls and the boxes and began firing at random into the crowd. According to various reconstructions, most of the people who died in the Bataclan were killed in the first minutes after the terrorists arrived; many lay on the ground pretending to be dead, many others tried to escape to the bathrooms, fire exits, and onto the roof, and still others were taken hostage.
The first police officers arrived at the Bataclan around 10pm. They shot a terrorist, activating his explosive belt, and a few minutes later they were joined by men from the Brigades de Recherche et d’Intervention (BRI), a unit of elite of the French special forces. Around 11.45 pm the BRI agents broke down the door of the room in which the other two terrorists had taken people hostage, forcing them to go to the end of the corridor and leaving the hostages the space to escape to safety. The explosive belts of the terrorists were activated – it was not clear whether due to the bullets or if activated by them – and the operation was concluded: the dead were 90 in all. The attackers who died during the attacks, or a few days later during the police operations, there were nine in total.
Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels in March 2016: after the attacks in Paris he fled to Molenbeek, where he was originally from. In Belgium he had already been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the attempted murder of some policemen. Among the defendants in the Paris trial there is also the Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini, a childhood friend of Abdeslam: the night before November 13 he had accompanied the other members of the commando to Paris from Belgium, and then had returned back. He was found guilty of complicity in the murders and was sentenced to life in prison, but in a milder form than Abdeslam, and he will be able to seek probation after 22 years in prison.
The other convicts had participated in organizing the November 13 attacks in various ways and with varying degrees of involvement. Six were tried in absentia. One of them, Ahmed Dahmani, another friend of Abdeslam, was arrested in November 2015 in Turkey and sentenced in 2017 to 10 years and 9 months in prison for terrorism. The Turkish authorities refuse to bring him to French justice until he has served two thirds of his sentence. In the Paris trial he was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
The other five defendants in absentia, members of ISIS, probably died in Iraq or Syria, but, in the absence of formal evidence of their deaths, they could have been prosecuted under French law. Three of them – Oussama Atar, believed to be the organizer of the attacks, and brothers Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain – were sentenced to life in prison as Abdeslam. The penalties for other offenders range from one to thirty years in prison.
All convicts have ten days to appeal against the sentence.
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