in the bruised city, the civil parties await the trial in anguish

For a long time, the people of Nice avoided the “Prom'”, to the point of stalling, for a time, their real estate market. They fled this traditional Sunday stroll on the seafront like the plague; only returned there, sometimes, after heavy rains had come to “wash” the tarmac. As if it were necessary to put a distance between this 1.7 kilometers of scars and the rest of the city. Today, the trial of the four minutes who bereaved Nice will be held 900 kilometers from them, in Paris. This time, on the other hand, the distance is difficult to live with for many victims of the Côte d’Azur.

On July 14, 2016, barely ten minutes after the end of the fireworks display, attended by 30,000 people, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian living in Nice, had descended the Promenade des Anglais with a ram truck, killing 86 people. If the terrorist was killed the evening of the attack by the police, a trial will still take place. Eight people will be judged, in Paris, before the special assize court, from Monday, September 5. The three main defendants are prosecuted for “criminal terrorist association”. Another investigation is still in progress, to try to determine if there were flaws in the security system. At the heart of the investigation: the absence of concrete blocks and, before the evening, video surveillance which did not make it possible to stop the terrorist’s will, despite his multiple locations.

Also read the archive (2016): Article reserved for our subscribers Nice attack: from July 11 to 14, the eleven passages of the truck on the promenade

The trial, which should last at least two and a half months, will take place in the same room as that of the November 13 attacks, specially fitted out in the former courthouse on the Ile de la Cité. In Nice, the debates will be broadcast at the Acropolis Palace, after a major mobilization of the president of the Nice public prosecutor’s office, Adrien Verrier, and of the city. The huge hall, which usually hosts shows and conferences, must be able to accommodate 500 members of the public and several hundred journalists. As for “V 13” (nickname given to the November 13 trial), the proceedings will be filmed for posterity and broadcast by a web radio station accessible to victims, in French and English, from abroad. No less than thirty-nine nationalities are represented among the 865 registered civil parties.

“Fear” of the capital

In Nice, M.^e Olivia Chalus-Pénochet is preparing, like several of her colleagues, to leave her office for several months. They met in a group, called “14-7 Lawyers”, with other colleagues, to do together the titanic work of such a trial. For the lawyer, “this is no longer the time to complain that it will be in Paris, but that of the organization”. Before adding: “Dura lex sed lex: the law is hard but it is the law. » Today, the group’s priority is to “try to convince, until the last moment, the civil parties to ‘come up’ to testify”.

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