On March 24, 2016 at 6:34 p.m., in front of the door of a large studio in Argenteuil (Val-d'Oise), a team of investigators from the Directorate-General for Internal Security (DGSI) was preparing to send one of their dogs specialized in the detection of weapons and explosives.
The animal is already showing signs of interest when Reda Kriket, a 34-year-old Franco-Algerian, arrested a few hours earlier in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine) and which they removed from his custody for the search, comes out of its silence.
Tenant of the place under a false identity, the man whom the European antiterrorist services track for six months warns the police officers: “You have found the jackpot.
Do not send the dog because he (will) die.
"
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Three months after the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, two days after those in Brussels and a few weeks before the opening of Euro-2016 football, the imposing arsenal of war and the small chemical laboratory discovered in this " conspiratorial apartment ”are cold in the back.
Thirteen weapons including five Kalashnikov-type assault rifles and seven handguns.
A considerable stock of ammunition.
But also explosives already made and multiple ingredients to make them: 105 g of TATP, a material prized by the jihadists of the Islamic State;
a syringe detonator;
1.3 kg of industrial dynamite;
steel balls;
cans of nitric and sulfuric acid ...
Scattered around a safe, cupboards and storage room, boxes of fertilizer and Christmas garlands stand alongside twenty telephones, dozens of stolen or falsified identity documents, three maps of Paris, a wave jammer and abundant jihadist propaganda.
"The commission of an action of extreme violence, by a network ready to take action" has just been foiled, welcomes the prosecutor of the Republic of Paris at the time, François Molins.
"The judicial information made it possible to demonstrate the involvement of all the indicted, to varying degrees, in the preparation of an attack which could have turned out to be particularly deadly", write the investigating judges at the end of 2019 in the ordinance which sends Reda Kriket and six other suspects before the Assize Court specially composed of Paris for "criminal terrorist association".
Will we know who the target of the foiled attack was?
The trial of these seven men opens this Monday March 8 and until April 9.
He promises to dive into an underground world made up of incessant trips between Paris, Brussels and Rotterdam, trips to Turkey, Tunisia or Libya and stays hidden or projected in the Iraqi-Syrian zone.
A universe where former delinquents who have switched to radical Islam during stays in prison and followers of the "ghanima" (the theft of disbelievers to finance the cause), arms sellers and drug traffickers intersect.
Where hideout apartments are rented under false names and where the use of aliases and (real) false documents is the rule.
On the eve of the hearing remains an uncertainty: the three main defendants, who have always denied any plan to attack and often made use of their right to silence during the investigation, will they answer the questions of the court or will opt- they, as in the terrorist trials of the past, for a defense of rupture?
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According to our information, and without our decision being able to be interpreted, two of them, Reda Kriket, now 39 years old, and Anis Bahri, a 37-year-old Franco-Tunisian with whom he is suspected of s 'have arrived in Syria in early 2015, let it be known at the beginning of last week that they intended to defend themselves without a lawyer - even if the Special Assize Court will appoint them ex officio.
During the investigation, the third, Abderrahmane Ameuroud, 43, Algerian residing in Belgium and veteran of Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, said he was the victim of “arbitrary detention”.
For the prosecution, this trio, "long acquired to jihadist theses", constitutes "the ideological and operational heart of (the) cell.
"
In addition to the denials and the possible silence of the accused, the debates will probably not provide answers to two questions about this "Argenteuil cell": that of the intended target and that of its relations with the terrorist commandos of November 13 and March 22.
The investigation did not make it possible to formally demonstrate the existence of links, even if allusions to "other brothers" based in France and likely to take action during Euro-2016 appear in the reports. files from a computer found in a trash can by Belgian investigators the day after the attacks of March 22.
Are these brothers "still operational", asks a voice on an audio recording, attributed to Najim Laachraoui, fireworks of November 13 and suicide bomber of March 22, while Salah Abdeslam has just been arrested.
"I was tracking big dealers to take big bucks, they don't file a complaint"
"The end for me is banditry", defended Reda Kriket, key man in the case for the prosecution, during one of his last interrogations.
The former ultraviolent thug with the loaded locker, switched to radical Islam after a stint in prison in 2010, says this stockpile of weapons and explosives was only intended for heist activities to finance his run .
"I was tracking big dealers to take big bucks, they don't file a complaint," he said.
Asked about the excesses of the Islamic State and the attacks, Reda Kriket said he did not “support the bad things that happen.
He justified "a defensive jihad" to protect "women, children, the poorest and the weakest."
He contested any “taqya” (concealment) and explained that he was “forced” to hide because he was wanted.
An international arrest warrant was targeting him since a conviction in his absence to ten years in prison in July 2015 by the Belgian justice for his participation in a network to Syria.
A trial in which Khalid Zerkani, a Moroccan from Molenbeek, a major recruiter of jihad candidates, and where Abdelhamid Abaaoud, future conductor of the attacks of November 13, and other members of the terrorist network from Paris and Brussels, had also been condemned by default.
During the four years of investigation, Reda Kriket has in any case always denied having embraced the cause of Daesh.
And this, even faced with the statements of his childhood friend, one of his co-accused now because he is suspected of having supplied ammunition to the group.
Before returning to his statements, the latter had described it in 2012-2013 in Belgium, with Anis Bahri, extolling death as a martyr.
“They have already told me about the 60 virgins (…).
When you blow yourself up, the carnal envelope is useless, you smell the musk, you leave, you arrive like a king at the 7th level of paradise.
"