“We were immediately confronted with the banality of evil, that is to say the immense gap between the enormity of the crimes committed and the banality of Salah Abdeslam”, affirmed the psychiatrist Daniel Zagury who, with his colleague Bernard Ballivet, met the accused in prison in November 2021.
“It is a repeated observation, the participation in such acts does not require either to be a great pervert, or to be a very sick person, or a great psychopath”, puts forward Dr. Zagury.
“Evil is often banal”, recalls the doctor, quoting the philosopher Hannah Arendt, this “does not designate the nature of the evil but the nature of the people who commit them”.
“Evil is almost never committed in the name of evil. Evil is always committed in the name of good, truth, pure, just (…) This totalitarian arsenal protects him from the human he was before and that it will perhaps come back later”, he explains again. “Salah Abdeslam is obviously human but he has chosen totalitarian dehumanization”.
In a written report, the psychiatric experts specified that “the suffering of the civil parties is only the collateral effect, certainly regrettable in his eyes, but inevitable, of the commitment to war against France” of the accused.
“The people who drank on the terrace of a café or those who took part in a concert were only the objectified representatives of a country to be fought and of a population to be terrorized”, they also considered.
“In other words, Salah Abdeslam will only be able to authentically experience feelings towards them when he has come out, if he comes out, of this dehumanizing arsenal which thinks for him, which has the answer to everything and which forbids him to experience” , they added.
“In the meantime, the victims are for him the targets of a war in which he was a soldier,” said the experts.
After several refusals, the only member still alive of the jihadist commandos which killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015 agreed to be examined by two psychiatric experts in his Fleury-Mérogis cell in November 2021, two months after the start of the trial.
“He accepted the interview but set his limits and explained that he will not give details, will not want to speak about the facts and his motivations. The interview lasted two and a half hours. shown to be very controlled, expressing very little emotion,” said Dr. Bernard Ballivet at the helm.
During the exam, Salah Abdeslam “was courteous but was careful to weigh each of his words”, said his colleague Zagury. “There was no reluctance but a lot of caution”.
“He seemed anxious to bear witness to an image of himself opposed to what would be reverberated from him. As if he oscillated between the protest of humanity and the displayed maintenance of a determined commitment”, assured the practitioner.
As in recent weeks before the court, Salah Abdeslam insisted before the psychiatrists on the fact that he had “killed no one”. But, underlined the doctor, he also affirmed that the attacks were “a necessary evil”.
Radicalized, “he entered a totalitarian system that suppresses first-person thinking”, describes Dr. Zagury, referring to “a parrot reciting its litany”.
For Salah Abdeslam to become “aware of his actions”, it will take “a long journey”, he said. “Basically, the challenge for him is to become the little guy from Molenbeek again or to continue in the posture of the soldier of God”.
Since the opening of the trial in early September, Salah Abdeslam has shown himself to be provocative, insolent, master of time and unpredictable.
Presenting himself as “an Islamic State fighter” on the first day of the trial, he shed tears during his final interrogation last week as he begged “forgiveness” from the victims of the attacks.