a terrorist trial without perpetrator or accomplice

two months after the end of the river trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015the temporary “Grand Trial” room, specially built in the historic Palais de Justice on the Ile de la Cité, in Paris, is preparing to host a second terrorist trial which will also mark memories because of the immense barbarism of the facts and its immeasurable emotional charge: that of the second deadliest attack to have struck France since the Second World War, the attack on the truck which left 86 dead and several hundred injured, on July 14, 2016 , on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice.

Two attacks, two trials, two appalling human tolls. Like that of November 13, the trial of the Nice attack, which opens Monday, September 5 and should last three and a half months, will give a large place to the words of the victims, injured or relatives of the disappeared. Before the start of the hearing, 865 people had joined as civil parties, and nearly 250 have already announced their desire to come and testify. A tsunami of horror, of physical and psychological wounds, of impossible mourning, of anger too, is about to pour out once again in the light wooden room of the specially composed assize court in Paris.

But if these two trials meet in the atrocity of the facts judged, they diverge on an essential point, which will make two very different audiences. Facing them, in the dock of the accused, the victims of November 13 had a “co-perpetrator” of the attacks, Salah Abdeslam, and accomplices, the last representatives of an established terrorist cell. In the box of the trial of Nice will take place neither author nor accomplice, no cell strictly speaking.

The author of the attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, killed by the police, will not be judged. In his absence, eight defendants, none of whom is considered to be radicalized, are sent back to the Assize Court: three of his relatives for terrorist criminal association, and five people who did not know him, tried for simple criminal offenses relating to the supply of his weapon. The gap between the ocean of pain that the victims will carry on the stand and the insignificance of the defendants who will face them has probably never been so abysmal in a terrorist trial. The risk of disappointing the expectations of civil parties seeking answers is immense.

The Promenade des Anglais Cemetery

The fireworks had just ended, on this national holiday, when the Promenade des Anglais turned into a cemetery. At 10:33 p.m., Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian delivery driver, deliberately drove into the crowd gathered for the festivities aboard a rental truck. Over nearly 2 kilometres, it shreds passers-by, old people, women and children under its wheels. His murderous ride was interrupted after four minutes and seventeen seconds, when he was shot dead by police at the wheel of his 19-ton after opening fire with a semi-automatic pistol.

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