“None of the 20 defendants appealed,” Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz told AFP on Tuesday.
“The national anti-terrorist prosecutor (Pnat) and the public prosecutor at the Paris Court of Appeal have not appealed this decision either,” he said. The verdict of the special assize court of Paris “has acquired a final character today and there will therefore be no appeal trial”.
The ten-day appeal period expired Monday at midnight.
The choice made by Salah Abdeslam “does not mean that he adheres to the verdict and the incompressible life sentence which results from it, but that he resigns himself to it”, reacted his lawyers, My Olivia Ronen and Martin Vettes, on Twitter.
On June 29, at the end of a historic trial, Salah Abdeslam became the fifth man in France sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty in the criminal code, which makes any possibility of release minimal.
“If such a sentence is unacceptable, we respect the decision of the person we are assisting”, added his lawyers, who had pleaded against “a slow death sentence” aimed, according to them, at “definitively neutralizing an enemy” and not a man who “evolved” during the trial.
“There is no honor in condemning a vanquished to despair,” they concluded.
– Co-author –
During the trial, the only member still alive of the jihadist commandos who left 130 dead and hundreds injured in Paris and Saint-Denis claimed to have “given up” on triggering his explosive belt in a Parisian bar the evening of the attacks, by “humanity”.
“I’m not an assassin, I’m not a killer,” said Salah Abdeslam, apologizing to the victims.
The court had in its decision rejected the thesis of “renunciation” and ruled that the explosive vest which Salah Abdeslam was wearing “was not functional”.
She recognized the 32-year-old Frenchman guilty of being the “co-author” of a “unique crime scene”: the Stade de France, the machine-gunned Parisian terraces and the Bataclan.
After 148 days of hearing marked by nearly 400 statements from survivors and relatives of victims, the verdict was welcomed with relief on the part of the civil parties.
Salah Abdeslam’s 19 co-defendants (six of whom five were presumed dead were tried in their absence) were sentenced to terms ranging from two years’ imprisonment to life.
The court sentenced Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” of the Brussels attacks, also scheduled for November 13, to life imprisonment with a 22-year security sentence.
“He recognizes the principle of his guilt, and knows that he has not been sentenced to the maximum sentence,” one of his lawyers, Marie Violleau, told AFP to explain her decision not to do so. call.
Salah Abdeslam, Mohamed Abrini and three other of their co-defendants in Paris are to be tried from October in Belgium for the attacks of March 22, 2016.
– “Failure” –
In its decision in Paris, the court ruled out the terrorist qualification, disputed by several defendants, only for one of them.
The sentences handed down, however, were generally lower than those required by the Pnat, prompting some defense lawyers to criticize “political” and “tactical” rather than “fair” sanctions.
They “had only one purpose: to dissuade them from appealing while declaring them guilty. It’s done. And this is the failure of this trial”, reacted in a press release the lawyers of the three defendants who had appeared free at the hearing and emerged free, Abdellah Chouaa, Ali Oulkadi and Hamza Attou.
Sentenced to eight years in prison in particular for having gone to look for Salah Abdeslam in Paris, Mohammed Amri, who has already spent nearly seven in detention, will be able to benefit from an “early release, even today”, explained his lawyer, Mr. Negar Haeri. “He therefore favored his immediate release over the ability to challenge his guilt” on appeal.
The only sentences pronounced going beyond the requisitions: those targeting the accused presumed dead in Syria. The five senior executives of the Islamic State group, including the sponsor of the attacks, were all sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Now is the time to get back to our lives, which we want to be as normal and peaceful as possible,” responded the victims’ association Life for Paris.
