GSPC, al-Qaida, Afghanistan… On Friday, the Assize Court which judges Reda Kriket and his alleged accomplices for a planned attack in 2016, looked like an Islamist time machine.
In pursuit of the missing link that ideologically links the Islamist terrorism of the years 1990-2000 to that of today.
This weekend, this "link" takes the form of a man with a full beard and ponytail hair.
The soft voice, the measured tone and the argued words, Abderrahmane Ameuroud is 43 years old, of which more than twenty passed in the crosshairs of the Algerian, French and Belgian intelligence services.
Confronted with his judicial past and his accusers of yesteryear, he is content to let go "
that remains to be proven
" and to declare: "
Allah forgives
[these accusers],
and I, like a little servant, forgive them
. "
To read also:
Attack foiled before Euro 2016: at the assizes, Reda Kriket recognizes only the law of Allah
In any case, President Raviot has an impressive track record.
Having left his hometown of Algiers in 1995, because he "
was annoyed by the police like everyone else in working-class neighborhoods with kicks, punches, humiliations
", Ameuroud arrives in France.
From 1997, he was 20 years old, he was on the radar of the General Intelligence as close to a Parisian cell supporting the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, born in 1998 from a split from the Algerian GIA and which will become in 2007 al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb).
In 1998, he was arrested in a vast crackdown against the cell accused of preparing an attack.
But he was released and was therefore not tried with his presumed friends in 2000. Two decades later, it is clear that the magistrates and the anti-terrorist police officers then had no hallucinations: among the convicted, there were leaders like Omar Saiki or Karim Bourti, stripped of French nationality, or jihadists like Hervé Djamel Loiseau, who died in Afghanistan in 2001, or Brahim Yadel, arrested in Afghanistan and detained for several years in Guantanamo.
Logistical support
For Abderrahmane Ameuroud, the meeting with justice is only postponed.
In 2000-2001, he made, via London, a stay in Afghanistan, which he disputes like everything else and will contest "
until the end of
[his]
days
".
He is also associated, after the 1998 cell and with cross-checks with it, in two of the "big" cases of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The first issue is that of the "group of campers" , the legend that the name comes from a famous Parisian store where suspects were shopping.
This group, of which Ameuroud was part, engaged in very extensive training in the forest, in the mountains, to become more experienced and to prepare for the rigors of Afghanistan.
The second case is that of the attack against Ahmed Chah Massoud, opposing the Afghan Taliban, assassinated on September 9, 2001 by an al-Qaida commando.
Ameuroud reportedly provided logistical support to the assassins.
To read also:
Ahmad Massoud: in the name of the father
Returning from Afghanistan, the accused was arrested on January 14, 2002. He was sentenced in 2005 to seven years in prison, accompanied by a definitive ban from the territory.
Spotted for his proselytism behind bars, he would have come across Reda Kriket.
Released in 2007, he was deported to Algeria.
But the harassment suffered by his Moroccan wife, who came to defend him on Friday, would have led him to leave for Belgium in 2013. According to the Islamist and jihadist documentation found at his home, these back and forth trips have nothing to do with it. changed to those beliefs.
It was in Belgium that he was arrested on March 25, 2016 under conditions that he denounced in court, a police officer having shot him while he had his 7-year-old son by his side.
At the hearing, his lawyer, Me Coutant-Peyre, underlined a desire, by recalling his client's past, to create “a profile” justifying the present accusations of a planned attack in 2016. For the defense, Ameuroud and Kriket knew each other little, knew nothing of their Islamist commitment, and had no terrorist plans.
More precise and less peremptory, the file speaks, for its part, of physical and telephone contacts between the two men and their main co-accused Anis Bahri, of home visits, DNA traces on the arsenal discovered (weapons, explosives, steel balls , without forgetting a forger's material).
And one wonders if, twenty years later, Abderrahmane Ameuroud is not always the man described by one of his accomplices in the early 2000s: “
He had very radical religious ideas and wanted to serve jihad by all means
. ”