Nineteen of 20 co-accused were found guilty as charged on Wednesday night at the culmination of a ten-month trial for the most murderous Islamist attack in French history.
The attacks in Paris and St Denis on the night of Friday, November 13th, 2015, killed 130 and left more than 500 injured.
Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the ten-member commando squad that detonated suicide vests, mowed down café-goers and wreaked terror in a concert hall over several hours, was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole by the special high criminal court comprising five judges.
The judges followed the prosecutor’s recommendations in prescribing life without parole, an extremely rare sentence, for Abdeslam. His lawyers earlier described the punishment as a slow death sentence.
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The prosecutor requested life in prison for half of the 20 defendants. The lightest sentence handed down on Wednesday night was for two years.
Only 14 defendants were present in court. The other six, all members of the Islamic State terror group, were tried in absentia and are believed to have died in Syria.
The trial, which opened last September 8th, took place over 148 days, making it the longest in French judiciary history. Nearly 2,600 victims and relatives of victims were civil plaintiffs.
Nine jihadists armed with assault rifles and suicide vests attacked the Stade de France, six bars and restaurants and the Bataclan music hall.
In December 2020, 14 men were convicted of helping jihadists who killed 17 people at the Charlie Hebdo weekly and in a kosher supermarket in January 2015. A trial related to the July 2016 truck attack that claimed 86 lives in Nice is due to begin in September.
Shortly after the latest trial started, Abdeslam defiantly described himself as a soldier of Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks.
By the end of the trial, he apologised to the victims. “I am not a murderer. I am not a killer,” he said from the dock. “Public opinion thinks I was on the café terraces with a Kalashnikov, firing on people. Public opinion thinks I was in the Bataclan.”
The prosecution said that Abdeslam, a 32-year-old French citizen of Moroccan origin, who grew up in Belgium, adopted the strategy of “constant minimisation” throughout the trial.
Abdeslam booked hotel rooms and rented cars for the jihadists. On the night of the attacks, he took the metro to southern Paris, abandoned his suicide vest in a waste bin and called a friend to drive him back to Brussels. He claimed he did so out of “humanity”.
“The court found that the explosive vest which [Abdeslam] wore was not functional, which seriously puts into doubt [his] statements that he decided not to detonate it,” said Judge Jean-Louis Périès.
Although he was not in Paris on the night of the attacks, Mohamed Abrini, the “man with the hat” who subsequently abandoned a luggage trolley filled with explosives in Brussels airport, was “fully integrated in the terrorist cell”, the court found. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 22 years.
Farid Kharkhach, the only defendant who was cleared of terrorism charges, was found guilty of associating with criminals to commit theft.
