Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of 10 jihadists who massacred 130 people in Paris on behalf of Islamic State last November 13th, was yesterday transferred from Belgium's Beveren prison to Fleury-Mérogis, 30km outside Paris.
Abdeslam will be held in solitary confinement, under 24-hour suicide watch.
Fleury-Mérogis is the biggest prison in Europe, with 4,378 prisoners for a capacity of only 2,855. In December, Yassin Salhi, who had decapitated his boss near Lyon last June, took his own life there.
"What matters to me is that he receive a fair trial and that he be convicted for the things he did, and not for those he did not do," said Abdeslam's French lawyer, Frank Berton.
On the night of November 13th, Abdeslam accompanied three suicide bombers to the Stade de France. He told Belgian police he planned to blow himself up too, but changed his mind at the last minute.
Though he rented cars and hide-outs for the massacre, Abdeslam did not participate in the actual killing.
Unexploded bomb
Abdeslam fled Paris on the morning of November 14th after dumping his unexploded suicide belt in a rubbish skip in the southern suburb of Montrouge.
Mohamed Amri and Hamza Attou, friends from Les Béguines, the bar and hashish joint that Abdeslam owned with his brother in the Molenbeek quarter of Brussels, drove to Paris to fetch him. They said he was tearful and panicked, and pleaded that they not turn him in.
Abdeslam was arrested in a shoot-out in Molenbeek on March 18th.
After meeting his client for the first time in Beveren prison on April 22nd, Mr Berton described him as “very beaten down” but said he had “a real desire to explain the facts, and how he was radicalised”.
Sven Mary, the lawyer who was hired by Abdeslam's brother Mohamed to defend him in Belgium, told Libération newspaper that he will be glad to be rid of him: "He's a little asshole from Molenbeek, a petty criminal, a follower not a leader."
“He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray,” Mr Mary continued. “He and his buddies have rendered an entire religion antipathetic. I asked him if he’d read the Koran, as I have, and he answered that he’d read an interpretation of it on the internet, which is perfect for simple minds.”
Snapped shut
After the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, revealed the contents of Abdeslam’s post-arrest interrogation to the press, his client “snapped shut like a clam”, Mr Mary said, threatening to sue the prosecutor for violating judiciary secrecy.
Hopes that Abdeslam may reveal how Islamic State, also known as Isis, recruits and finances its network in Europe, may be ill-founded. Under questioning in Belgium, Abdeslam claimed he had met Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged ringleader of the November 13th attacks, only once. The two men had been friends from childhood and were arrested together for armed robbery in 2011.
The April 13th issue of Dabiq, the English-language magazine of Isis, praised the three jihadists who died in the March 22nd attacks that killed 32 people in Brussels.
The Bakraoui brothers, Ibrahim and Khaled, who died at Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station, were the "brains" of the attacks, Dabiq said.
Nadim Laachraoui, one of the Zaventem bombers, prepared the explosives for both the Paris and Brussels attacks, Dabiq confirmed. Police had found Laachraoui's DNA on explosives in both cities.
Laachraoui had been a jailer of French journalists held hostage by Isis in 2013 and 2014. He had crossed the Austrian- Hungarian border with Salah Abdeslam in September 2015, under the false name Soufiane Kayal.
The near-complete jigsaw of the Paris and Brussels attacks shows they were perpetrated by the same network.
A third man travelled with Laachraoui and Abdeslam under the name Samir Bouzid. He was Mohamed Belkaid, shot dead by police three days before Abdeslam's arrest.
Ran away
Commentators speculate that Isis would like to kill Abdeslam.
Dabiq
praised Belkaid for wounding Belgian and French police during the shoot-out, while Abdeslam and
Mohamed Abrini
“ran away into the forest”.
Abrini was arrested on April 8th. He was the "man in the hat" who walked away from an unexploded bomb in Brussels airport. Abrini had driven to Paris with Abdeslam on the eve of the Paris attacks.