The president of the specially composed Assize Court of Paris has just asked Franco-Algerian Islamist Reda Kriket, 39, if he still did not wish to be assisted by his lawyers, as he had indicated to the registry on previous week.
With a piece of paper in hand, the man in a black short-sleeved polo shirt, a thin beard hidden by his mask, then launches into a sort of opening statement.
Nervous, he reads quickly, in a jerky and not very audible voice, a text in which it is a question of "the bliss of the Hereafter", of "corrupted vision of the truth" and of a "tribunal of ideology. and injustice ”.
"I only recognize the laws of my Almighty", he continues, without uttering the word "Allah".
And as for his advice, My Xavier Nogueras and Yassine Bouzrou?
insists the president, impassive.
"I do not want them to defend me with your law, but that they only explain facts," says Reda Kriket, finally accepting that they are committed to him again.
"(Our client) has from the start contested any plan for a terrorist attack on French soil," Me Bouzrou recalled during a recess.
This Monday, March 8, on this first day of a trial scheduled over five weeks, the former robber Reda Kriket (who is pronounced with the final "T"), tried for "criminal terrorist association" alongside six others men for an attack plan foiled shortly after the Brussels attacks and a few weeks before Euro 2016 football, is not the only one to express his disapproval to appear before the Special Assize Court.
One of the accused refuses to appear at the hearing
For some unknown reason, one of his main co-defendants, Anis Bahri, 37, refuses to set up jails in the basement of the court of appeal to appear at the hearing.
The president is careful to emphasize: “We are free to hold our own convictions, but attending his trial is important.
This is a time when you can assert your truth.
There is the accusation, and there is the word of the accused.
"
In this case, none of the seven men in the file, presumed members of what the investigators baptized "the Argenteuil cell" because of the colossal arsenal of weapons and explosives discovered on March 25, 2016 in an apartment in this city. city, did not admit having participated in the preparation of an attack.
In the narrow courtroom, placed under close surveillance, they were divided into two boxes, according to their presumed degree of involvement.
On the left for the court, the trio Reda Kriket, Anis Bahri (therefore absent) and the Algerian Abderrahmane Ameuroud, 43, a veteran of the Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan injured in the leg during his arrest in Belgium.
A trio with long-standing ties, forged in prison in the second part of the 2000s and which, "long acquired to jihadist theses", constitutes for the accusation "the ideological and operational heart of the cell".
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In the box on the right, four other defendants, including Miloud Feia, a 45-year-old Franco-Algerian already convicted of terrorism.
It was the arrest of the latter in Adana in Turkey, a city near Syria, on November 7, 2015 with Tarek Bahri, brother of Anis Bahri, which was the starting point of the drawer investigation that had led police officers from the DGSI (General Directorate of Internal Security) to Reda Kriket.
