It’s the first time he’s said it… but he won’t say more for now. At the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, the “man in the hat” of the Brussels attacks Mohamed Abrini admitted on Tuesday that he was “planned” for the attacks in Saint-Denis and Paris. It’s March 22, the anniversary of the attacks that killed 32 people in Brussels in March 2016, and Mohamed Abrini would have preferred that “we are talking regarding commemorations‘ rather than him. The 37-year-old Belgian is the ‘man in the hat’ whose photo everyone saw taken by CCTV at Zaventem airport, dark bob on his head, pushing a trolley of “40 kilos of explosives”as he recalls before the special assize court in Paris.
“The Convoy of Death“
Before giving up on blowing himself up and fleeing. For the prosecution, this renunciation was the second in a few months: because the day before the attacks which killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis in November 2015, Mohamed Abrini had taken the road to the French capital with the members of the commando of the Stade de France, Parisian terraces and the Bataclan. “The Convoy of Death“, as he had described to the investigators. But he had left the same evening for Brussels, by taxi.
During his auditions, Mohamed Abrini always maintained that he had only come to accompany his friends “in their last breath“, an astonishing risk-taking and judged to be not very credible. The prosecution believes rather that he had also given up there, which would explain a last-minute change of team among the other members of the commando. But at the hearing of this Today, Mohamed Abrini is only questioned regarding his role in the logistics of the attacks between the end of August and the very beginning of November.
I did not sew explosive vests
For several hours, the court, the public prosecutor, the lawyers for the civil parties and even the defense remind him in turn, with more or less tact, of what he sometimes tends to say “anything” when he is “in the fog” in her head. “It’s been proven, I think.e”, obediently agrees the accused, brick sweater, surgical mask on his face.
Confusingly at times, in the flowery tirades that characterize him, he argues that he did not “never” participated in the preparations in the weeks leading up to the attacks. “I didn’t buy weapons, I didn’t rent cars, I didn’t sew explosive vests.”
I will light your lantern next week
Also for the first time, he declares having spent a day at the end of August in an apartment in Charleroi with his childhood friend Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the attacks that all European intelligence services believed at the time to be in Syria. “We talk regarding the neighborhood, his family, his injury“- by bullet, at the level of the collarbone, he shows his hand -, not plans for attacks, he insists in the face of repeated questions. “I know that serious things are going to happen”, “there are a lot of people from my neighborhood who left for Syria, and there they came back. I know that they are not here to do business. sightseeing or shopping“, consent-il.
An expected next week
For the rest, things “much more serious” he did later, “I’ll enlighten you next week,” he promises. When it is her turn to ask questions, her lawyer Marie Violleau takes her place at the desk facing the court, turns to the box and says to her: “you have seen, your statements, we do what we want with them”. So “we will take what is in the file, the concrete elements”she offers.
Mohamed Abrini intervenes. “If I spoke of Abaaoud, it is that we are approaching the interrogations on November 13“, he justifies. “I’ll tell you, I was even scheduled for 13-November. I plan to talk regarding that next week.“Marie Violleau takes a second. Then:”we are moving forward a bit. We’re making a lot of progress”.
But we will not know more: the hearing schedule established by the court, sometimes a source of frustration, cuts the interrogations of the defendants in chronological order. The final preparations for the attacks and the evening of November 13 will not be discussed until March 29 – starting with the interrogation of Mohamed Abrini. “We expect a lot from next week so“, concludes President Jean-Louis Périès.