TRIAL OF NOVEMBER 13 MAXIMUM SENTENCE AGAINST SALAH ABDESLAM AND NINE OTHER ACCUSED REQUESTED BY THE NATIONAL ANTI-TERRORIST PROSECUTION

At the end of a three-day indictment, the prosecution asked this Friday for exemplary sanctions, including the heaviest existing in the Penal Code for Salah Abdeslam, the survivor of the commandos . The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) has thus requested the maximum sentence against Salah Abdeslam and nine other defendants. The other sentences required range from five to thirty years in prison.

"Your verdict will not restore peace to the victims, it will not heal physical and psychological wounds, it will not bring back the dead, warns Camille Hennetier, concluding the river indictment of the three general attorneys of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) started on Wednesday. But he will say that justice and law have the last word. »

The twenty men accused of having helped and supported the killers of November 13, 2015 know, since yesterday, the sanctions that the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) requires against them, on behalf of the French people. The verdict of the special assize court will fall on June 29.

"Their blood on their hands"

Unsurprisingly, the prosecution is asking for “incompressible” life imprisonment against the Franco-Moroccan Salah Abdeslam, 32, “soldier of the Islamic army, the only surviving co-author of the 130 deaths of November 13. He has their blood on his hands, as others have it on their conscience”, consider Camille Hennetier, Nicolas Braconnay and Nicolas Le Bris, magistrates of the prosecution. According to them, Salah Abdeslam, "who had dropped three human bombs" - three suicide bombers - in front of the Stade de France, carefully prepared "these massacres" with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, killed in the attack on Saint-Denis, November 18, 2015. The prosecution devoted long developments to Salah Abdeslam with an obsession: to dismantle the role of "alleged surprise guest" of the attacks put forward at the hearing.

“His jihadist commitment is old. There is no reason to say that he was his brother's puppet, ”recalled Nicolas Le Bris on Wednesday. The PNAT also emphasizes its essential role in the transport of the members of the commando to Belgium. "It's a key mission: the one who repatriates is necessarily someone in whom the cell has all its confidence", notes Camille Hennetier. The arrival in waves of future assassins between September 1 and October 14 acts “the constitution of a real katiba in the heart of Europe”.

No mitigating circumstances either, in the eyes of the prosecution, against Abdeslam's companions on the run between November 2015 and March 22, 2016, the date of the Brussels attacks. Life imprisonment is therefore also required against Sofien Ayari, 28, and Osama Krayem, 29, whom the prosecution suspects of having targeted an attack at Amsterdam airport.

As for Mohamed Abrini, " the man in the hat" of the Brussels attacks, "left like a thief" on the night of November 12 to 13 by forcing the cell to reorganize, "his renunciation cannot be analyzed as a withdrawal voluntary, and it has no effect on his previous acts of complicity. What will happen on the evening of November 13, he ardently wished, ”sings Nicolas Le Bris. The prosecution nevertheless took his escape into account by combining the required life imprisonment with a twenty-two-year security period.

The advocates general of the Pnat also demand life imprisonment against Mohamed Bakkali, 35, who has already been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for the attack, in August 2015, of the Thalys train. And against the accused detained by Turkey, the prosecution asks for thirty years.

Perpetuity required, again, for the five major absentees from this trial, supposedly dead in Syria and therefore tried by default. Among them, Osama Atar, considered "as the mastermind of the attacks, the senior executive of terror". Ditto for the brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, Normans at one point in their life "and who had claimed on the telephone - singing - the carnage of Paris". For nine other defendants, aged 29 to 41, prosecuted for "participation in a terrorist criminal association", the sentences requested range from five, six (three defendants), eight, nine, sixteen and twenty years of imprisonment for the two most involved according to the Pnat.

If the prosecution admits that the accused do not all share the same jihadist convictions, ideology is in his eyes at the heart of this case. “We are not condemned for what we think, underlines Camille Hennetier. But we will have to be for what we have done in the name of what we think. »

And who can forget this terrible record? Ninety dead at the Bataclan, thirty-nine on the café terraces, one at the Stade de France. Two injured, a woman and a man, have since killed themselves. 397 survivors or relatives of victims have come to testify to their trauma since September. The defense will plead from Monday .