The main defendant in the 2015 Paris attacks said he left everything “to become an ISIS fighter”.

Salah Abdeslam, the principal of the accused who appear today in the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis, He said at the start of the hearing that he is an “Islamic State fighter”.

When the president of the tribunal, Jean-Louis Periès, asked him what his profession was, the young Franco-Moroccan explained that I had given up all work “to become an Islamic State fighter.”

Previously, when the judge told him to stand up to give his identity, the only survivor of the commandos who carried out the attacks stressed that he first wanted to say that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Abdeslam, 31, was the first of 14 defendants present at the Paris Criminal Court (there are six other courts in absentia, five of which are said to have died) to be questioned about his identity.

And he was the only one to have made a religious comment acknowledging his membership in the Islamic State.

It was also the only one who did not want to answer any of the president’s questions about his identity, by refusing to give the names of his parents.

Abdeslam managed to flee Paris a few hours after the perpetration of the massacres in the Bataclan room, six terraces of the city and the Stade de France and was not arrested until March 2016 in Brussels. With the crimes for which he is accused, he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

This 31-year-old man, once a party animal who committed minor crimes before converting to jihadism, is the the only survivor of the commandos who attacked Paris, the “tenth man”, and the trial will have to specify his exact role.

Once the 14 defendants present in the room presented – eleven are imprisoned, three of them appear free – Periès took the floor to say that it is a “historic” process by the “dramatic intensity” of the facts judged and by their magnitude.

Above all, he wanted to insist that “Our Correctional Court’s mission is to examine the indictments of the accused” and “take all the consequences from a penal point of view “, but look no further.

Added that the court differs from other institutions that examine the political dimension, historical or sociological of these attacks in which 130 people died and several hundred were injured. For this reason, he reiterated that it is necessary to “maintain the dignity of justice”.

“We will ensure that this exceptional trial does not become an exceptional trial”, warned Abdeslam’s lawyers. Twelve of the 20 defendants risk life imprisonment for this night of horror which began shortly after 9.15 p.m. in Saint-Denis.

At this moment, a suicide bomber activated his explosives near the Stade de France, where a friendly football match between France and Germany took place, with thousands of people in the stands, including the then president Francois Hollande.

Two more suicide bombers followed minutes later causing the death of a bus driver. Abdeslam also had to fly but ended up fleeing to Belgiumbecause, according to investigators, his explosive belt was defective.

Then in the center of Paris, two commandos of three men each fired on the terraces of bars and restaurants and shot dead those attending a concert at the Bataclan, where the police launched an assault after midnight.

The worst attack in Paris since World War II toll was 130 dead and more than 350 injured, at a time when an international coalition was fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq and when thousands of Syrians sought to reach Europe by fleeing war.

Four years of investigation have made it possible to reconstruct a large part of the logistics of the attacks and the course followed by the members of the command.: on a migratory route from Syria to their rented hiding places in Belgium and near Paris.

Researchers have discovered a much larger jihadist cell and also responsible for the attacks that killed 32 people on March 22, 2016 in the metro and at Brussels airport, another of the attacks that bloodied Europe during these years.

(With information from EFE and AFP)

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