Postponed twice, this trial of exceptional scope will last nine months to try twenty defendants, alleged accomplices in the attacks of Friday, November 13, 2015, perpetrated by nine suicide bombers.
300 lawyers will participate in the trial, 1,800 people have become civil parties and the witnesses will take the stand for five weeks.
These attacks coordinated by the Islamists left 130 dead and 1300 wounded in two hours, in Paris and Saint-Denis (93).
During that appalling night, three terrorists blew themselves up near the Stade de France. Three others fired in bursts on six terraces of cafes and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris; one of them ended up triggering his explosive belt on a last terrace, at the Comptoir Voltaire. The other three terrorists killed 90 people in Bataclan and injured hundreds.
This trial of the attacks of November 13, which opens on Wednesday September 8, will therefore be extraordinary, by the horror of the crimes tried, its duration and its logistics.
It required the construction of a 550-seat courtroom, with a video capture system, within the walls of the former courthouse in Paris.
During these six years of investigation, a million pages of proceedings have been established, investigations have been carried out in Europe and beyond.
From September 8, the Paris Special Assize Court judges 20 defendants, including Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the commandos guided by the Islamic State (IS) group that evening.
Around him, the investigators managed to identify planners, logisticians, conveyors and intermediaries.
“In the box, we will find ourselves with defendants who had an extremely important part in the facts. We should not focus on Salah Abdeslam alone, ”underlines the former Paris prosecutor François Molins. "We are in the mass murder and the investigations, out of the ordinary, were really able to go to the end".
The file of 542 volumes is gigantic. It is overflowing with a "considerable number of seals" made up at the scene of the attacks, in the three attackers' cars and their "conspiratorial lodgings" in France and Belgium, with "systematic" searches for fingerprints and genetic traces. . The investigation traced the course of the attackers “between the summer of 2014 and the attacks. The chronology and the role of each are well established, ”note experts in the affair. Timothée Boutry, one of the special envoys of the “Parisian” at the November 13 trial, tells us about the organization of this event in the video above.
