The sole surviving member of a cell alleged to have carried out the November 2015 terrorist bombings and shootings across Paris insisted he was not a killer, as the nine-month trial drew to a close.
“I’ve made mistakes, but I’m not an assassin. I’m not a killer. If you convict me for murder you will be committing an injustice,” Salah Abdeslam told the special court in Paris on Monday.
“My first words are for the victims. I have already said sorry.
“Some will say my apologies are insincere, that it is a strategy, as if you needed a third person to judge. More than 130 dead, more than 400 victims, who can apologise insincerely for so much suffering?” Abdeslam, 32, added.
The 14 men in the dock accused of involvement in the jihadi attacks were given a last chance to speak before a verdict and sentencing expected on Wednesday.
“It has not escaped anyone’s notice that I have evolved during this trial,” Abdeslam told the court. “I wanted to explain to you some incidents during my imprisonment, not with the aim of complaining, far from it. It is ridiculous to compare my pain to yours, but I would like to explain my evolution.”
Abdeslam, wearing a grey quilted sweatshirt, described how a large prison guard “manhandled” and “pulled my hair” while imprisoned in Belgium after his arrest.
“What shocked me most was the pleasure of being hurt myself,” he says.
Another time when he was suffering with appendicitis, he says he was “dragged like a dog to the hospital” but, faced with the “kindness of the nurses”, he found himself “unable to speak”.
Another defendant, Mohamed Bakkali, accused of offering assistance to the attackers, told the court: “I strongly condemn these attacks. I am sincerely presenting my apologies to the victims. I didn’t do it before because words had no place faced with their pain.”
Only one of those present, Osama Krayem, who has refused to speak throughout the trial, remained silent.
During the trial, which opened last September, Abdeslam described himself as a “fighter for Islamic State” but said he had chosen not to set off his suicide vest, which was found near a rubbish bin in northern Paris.
However, a police explosives expert told the court the suicide vest thought to have been worn by Abdeslam was faulty. The witness said the detonators on the front and back were “defective” and there was no switch or battery.
“I suppose it could have been set off with a match or a lighter. And if the TATP [explosive] was dry enough it could have gone off unexpectedly by itself,” he said.
The testimony threw doubt on Abdeslam’s claims that he backed out of taking part in the attacks at the last minute.
The police expert said it was impossible to know if Abdeslam had tried to detonate the vest: “We can’t know that: it’s instant, either it works or it doesn’t work.”
IS claimed responsibility for the attacks on 13 November 2015, which began at about 9pm with the detonation of a suicide bomb at the Stade de France and continued with a number of drive-by shootings and bombings at busy cafes and restaurants in the capital, and a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall.
Abdeslam, a Brussels-born French national, is accused of being key to the international logistics operation bringing jihadists back to Europe from Syria, where they had been fighting.
He was arrested in March 2016, after a four-month manhunt, in a shootout with Belgian police in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean. Days after he was taken into custody, suicide bombers suspected of being part of the same terrorist cell struck at Brussels airport and the city’s metro system, killing 32 and injuring hundreds.
The public prosecutor has requested a full life sentence for Abdeslam with very little, if any, possibility of being freed.
Olivia Ronen, Abdeslam’s lawyer, said such a sentence would be the equivalent of a “slow death sentence”.
Prosecutors had argued that the full life sentence – imposed only four times in France since 2007 and then only for those who had killed a child after torturing or raping them – was justified in Abdeslam’s case because his rehabilitation back into society seemed impossible because of his “deadly ideology”.
“I don’t believe a return to before would be possible,” said the prosecutor Camille Hennetier, quoting Voltaire saying: “When fanaticism has rotted the brain, the illness is almost incurable.”
She added: “We are well aware what this sentence means, but it’s the only socially acceptable response to protect society.”
During cross-examination Abdeslam – who until then had mostly refused to speak since his arrest – told the court: “I did not kill anyone and I did not injure anyone. I didn’t inflict so much as a scratch on anyone. It’s important for me to say this.”
He added: “What I can tell you is that I am not a danger to society.”
The marathon legal process is the biggest ever criminal trial in France. Fourteen suspects are in the dock and another six people are being tried in their absence, five of them presumed dead in Iraq or Syria, with the sixth in prison in Turkey.