Countdown: new installment of the chronicles of Emmanuel Carrère since the trial for the Paris attacks

Actor and director Sacha Guitry in Paris in 1927. Keystone-France (Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Chapter 25

1. The Rue Max-Roos computer

On March 22, 2016, a truck from the Bruxelles Propreté waste collection company makes its morning rounds.

In a rubbish bin on rue Max-Roos in Schaerbeek, garbage collectors find two computers, a tablet and a mobile phone.

A bargain, if it weren't for the fact that one of the computers is destroyed, with half the keys ripped out: one more scrap.

The tablet and phone are in no better shape, but when they open the other computer, a black Hewlett-Packard PC, the home screen lights up to show seven men in ski masks posing in front of an Islamic State flag.

Did the garbage men immediately identify that flag?

We do not know, it is not they who testify at the hearing, but a Belgian investigator.

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All the chronicles of Emmanuel Carrère on the trial of Paris

An hour later, like everyone else in Brussels, they learn that two kamikazes have just exploded at Zaventem airport and another one at Maelbeek metro station: several dozen dead, the bloodiest attacks ever perpetrated in Belgium.

The garbage collectors deliver the computer to the police, who have already discovered the identity of the terrorists, all of them implicated, moreover, in the November 13 attacks.

In the subway: Khalid El Bakraoui.

At the airport: Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui, as well as the eternal companion, Mohamed Abrini, who, like four months before in Paris, will prudently vanish while his companions activate their explosive belts.

All this is only spoken of indirectly on Friday the 13th,

because it will be the subject of another trial that should not be juxtaposed with the one in Paris and that will be held in Belgium this autumn.

In it, Abdeslam, Abrini...

But the computer found in the garbage can is our concern.

The terrorists got rid of him the very morning of the attack, leaving his hideout on rue Max-Roos.

The day before most of the files were deleted and, therefore, there is no access to their content, but the

(computer experts) of the Belgian police have reconstructed the history of the searches, which inform us of the following data: the computer was put into operation on August 14, 2015;

on October 12 they created a folder titled

(which means “explosive” in Arabic) and above all a

, that is, “objectives”.

Among those chosen then are “Catholic Youth / Monarchists / Civitas (an fundamentalist Catholic movement), Punks, Défense (the office district of La Défense in Paris? The Ministry of Defense?).

If they had stuck to these targets, the attacks would have aroused other kinds of emotions.

Imagine that the victims had been fundamentalist Catholics, gunned down at the exit of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, or perroflautas shot in the last basement of the Forum des Halles: they would have felt sorry for them, of course, but the French thirty-somethings would not have identified so much .

Less than a month later, the jihadists refined this reflection: on November 7 they created the folder

.

This folder includes five sub-folders:

(this is the command of the terraces, directed by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, alias Abou Omar);

(the Stade de France command);

(with an archive, "Visit virtual del Bataclan", intended for show promoters), and finally the

(Amsterdam Airport) and the

.

The reflection has been refined, but the trials are still going on.

They think of an attack on the subway that will not be carried out.

In an attack at Schiphol that is not consumed either.

November 7, November 13: the succession of these dates so close together produces vertigo.

Six days before, everything was still up in the air.

In any case, there would be an attack, attacks, but the objectives could still be different.

Leaving the Bataclan after the concert, the young people who had bought tickets for the Eagles of Death Metal might have learned that there had been a massacre at the Châtelet-Les Halles metro station.

They would have been horrified, worried about friends who might have been there at the time, and then gone home.

I was sitting in the audience next to a man whose daughter had been killed at the Bataclan.

We exchanged glances, I knew what he thought: others would have died, Lola would still be alive.

2. “La vie d´un honnête homme” (The life of an honest man)

All this is of atrocious evidence.

The search history also reveals minor puzzles.

Films seen that are not only the bloodthirsty propaganda of the Islamic State, but also a recording of

, the adaptation of

, by Robert Hossein, and above all two comedies by Sacha Guitry,

and

.

I don't know the cinematographic tastes of Salah Abdeslam or Mohamed Abrini, perhaps I'm wrong in thinking that they prefer the great American hits, but I can't imagine that they saw Sacha Guitry films from the fifties of the last century, in black and white, with the emphatic old-fashioned diction and the sizzle of the sound.

I have seen, in case it gave me a clue,

.

Who knows?

Perhaps he would find a small echo, a detail that connects two mental universes as radically alien as that of a Belgian jihadist and an ingenious man of the theater, a comedian, a sovereignly free representative of a world long extinct.

I don't see any link.

tells the story of a great bourgeois, brilliantly played by Michel Simon, and his bohemian brother, also brilliantly played by Michel Simon.

They are twins, one of them dies and the other takes his place: it is a black comedy, very funny, I recommend it.

That our jihadists were able to see it, in the cellar of the Café des Béguines, between two videos of beheadings, was something that was mentioned in passing, as a banal oddity not worth spending time on.

A lawyer for the civil party was the only one who considered it, like me, incongruous enough to make an effort to find an explanation: perhaps the jihadists changed the names of the especially compromising files to these names?

It could be, but in such a case only one mystery is replaced by another.

It's hard to admit that these guys, a few days before the attacks, watched Sacha Guitry movies, but used Sacha Guitry movie titles as nominal codes for their recipes for explosives or their lists of hiding places...

3. Oasis cans and cream candies

Day after day

we approach the 13th, it is more and more nocturnal and oppressive.

On November 8: income of money, withdrawal of cash, 2,500 euros.

On November 9: rental of the Clio, the Polo, the Seat, by Abrini, the Abdeslam brothers and the second-placed Mohamed Amri.

November 10: rental of shelters in Bobigny and Altfortville, on the outskirts of Paris.

On November 11: activation of the 14 telephone lines that will put the “coordinators” who have remained in Belgium —probably the El Bakraoui brothers— in permanent contact with the jihadists whom the Belgian investigator calls “the authors”;

yes, that's what they are called: the perpetrators of a crime.

On November 12: the “convoy of death” —the expression is Abrini's— starts the march.

The Iraqis from the Stade de France go with Abaaoud in the Seat, the Abdeslams and Abrini in the Clio, the three from the Bataclan in the Polo, which stops between 3:36 p.m. and 3:41 p.m. at the Total de Nivelles gas station.

A surveillance camera films them in the store: three youngsters in windbreakers and sneakers buying cans of Oasis beer and a package of cream puffs.

They burst out laughing.

They know that they will be dead the next night but that before they die they will have killed many people.

As many as possible.

How many people?

Do you make forecasts while traveling?

bets?

If they had been told: tomorrow you will have killed 90 people, would the number have seemed 1) cool?

2) regular?

3) a little frustrating?

This chronicle, written for

, is published in

,

and

.

Published in

on March 31, 2022.

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