Not a beard protrudes from the ten blue masks lined up in the seating box.
Some of the defendants allow themselves little hair fantasies but, in this trial of the Islamist attacks of January 2015, none took the risk of showing the slightest hair with a conspiratorial connotation.
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The court began, Thursday, the examination of the personalities of the individuals who answer, for the majority, of association of terrorist criminals and, for one of them, of complicity with the killer of the Hyper Cacher, Amedy Coulibaly .
For the time being, it is profiles of common law offenders who parade.
Thus Abdelaziz Abbad, 36 years old,
"born in Charleville-Mézières, capital of the Ardennes"
.
Thirteen convictions in the record.
A lot for the drug business.
One - twenty-five years of criminal imprisonment - for complicity in an attempted assassination.
A thug from the bustling neighborhoods of Charleville, without a doubt.
A friend of the jihadists?
“I could not buy into this ideology,”
says Abbad.
You don't murder people in the name of a religion.
That's how I was educated. ”
Asked about his feelings towards the victims, he said:
"I share their suffering, they must suffer much more than me."
Then loses his temper in the face of the public prosecutor, who insists on his criminal conviction unrelated to the subject of the trial:
“People keep talking to me about this story.
We are here for a terrorism case: you have no questions on that? ”
Poor offenses
Metin Karasular seems to be made of the same wood, except that it has the Belgian accent.
Like Mr. Abbad, he is accused of helping Amedy Coulibaly to arm himself.
Manager of bars (translate: illegal gambling dens), rogue garage owner, this native of Turkish Kurdistan has been convicted thirteen times in his adopted country, in particular for cases related to drugs and weapons.
He has, for embarrassing questions, that meaningless slackness that signals professional scoundrels (in short: he answers anything).
But his dissolute way of life, his passion for gambling, do not signal a zealot for radical Islam.
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His friend Michel Catino is, at 68, the dean of the box.
It is difficult to see in this Belgian citizen born of Italian parents,
"pacifist Catholic",
a kind of bellicose Grand Mufti of Charleroi.
Mr. Catino is an inveterate player (
"I defended myself well at poker"
), sixteen times condemned in his country.
If the sentences are numerous, the offenses are lousy.
The one and a half year suspended sentence for theft of a dishwasher circumscribes the character's stature.
An assessor notes that the man spent eighteen months in German prisons.
The interested party explains that, eager to raise money to satisfy his passion for casinos, he had agreed to move
“weed”
from the Netherlands to Germany.
Of course, as we get closer to Amedy Coulibaly, the profiles harden.
Its weapons have traveled through Belgium and the north of France.
That several of the accused were able to take advantage of this dirty windfall, as the investigation tends to show, is plausible.
Did they know that Amedy Coulibaly was not planning a robbery but a terrorist bloodbath?
This is the question to which the Assizes have given themselves until November 10 to answer.
