PARIS (Reuters) – Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the sole surviving member of the Islamist squad that struck Paris in November 2015, told a court on Tuesday that he did not know of the attack plot from the outset and that he bore no responsibility for the 130 deaths that night.
Prosecutors allege that Abdeslam, a self-proclaimed Islamic State militant, made journeys across Europe in cars he hired to collect several of the would-be attackers who had returned from Syria and take them to Belgium in the months before the attack.
They also argue that during the attack his suicide vest failed to detonate and that he fled the French capital.
“The ones who killed, murdered people are not in the box. People must realise that,” Abdeslam told the court during a terse exchange with the judges, a reporter for France Inter radio present in the courtroom wrote on Twitter.
“People want to believe that I killed 130 people, that I hired the cars, that I knew everything from the start, but it’s not the case,” Abdeslam added, according to the France Inter reporter’s live account of the proceedings on Twitter.
A French national of Moroccan origin, Abdeslam told the court last month that he had backed out of detonating his explosive vest during the attack, in which the attackers carried out synchronised gun and bomb attacks on six restaurants and bars, the Bataclan concert hall and national soccer stadium.
Among the 20 defendants, Abdeslam is the only one to be directly accused of murder, attempted murder and hostage taking.
Abdeslam said it was correct he had transported a number of “brothers of Islam” returning from fighting abroad, but denied helping Bilal Hadfi who detonated his suicide vest outside the sports stadium and Chakib Akrouh who blew himself up during a police raid days after the attacks.
“Today there is a war in Ukraine and people are going to fetch others from the border, others are going there for humanitarian reasons, others to fight. The exact same thing happened with Syria,” Abdeslam told the court according to the France Inter journalist’s account.
(Reporting by Myriam Rivet; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
