Tuesday's session at the special criminal court in Paris ended abruptly when the fifty lawyers defending those accused of complicity in the November 2015 terrorist attacks left the courtroom en masse. They were protesting against "an atmosphere unfavourable to their clients' interests". The walk-out brought a premature end to a day marked by further unsatisfactory evidence from the sole surviving attacker, Salah Abdeslam.
Abdeslam is an infuriating individual.
He clearly enjoys his time at the centre of attention. His personal contradictions, however, leave little space for a coherent presentation of the facts.
On Tuesday, the sole survivor of the group which killed 130 people in Paris on the night of 13 November 2015 provided no new information. Instead, he proposed a toxic mixture of verbal aggression, attempted charm, rudeness, self-contradiction and outright provocation.
Abdeslam presented himself as a victim of the legal process. He once again cited the war in Syria as an excuse for the Paris attacks. He made outrageous comparisons between the fight against Islamic State and the Nazi attempt to eliminate Europe's Jews; he compared the Paris attackers to those refugees now fleeing the war in Ukraine. He flagrantly insulted two of the lawyers representing the families of victims.
Tribunal president, Jean-Louis Périès, made frequent calls for order and decorum, including a formal warning to the accused that he risked being held in contempt.
'This is not the National Assembly!'
The tension in the courtroom, which was packed with surviving victims and the families of the bereaved, mounted throughout an afternoon of circular evidence, smart-ass cheek and evasion by Abdeslam. Generally, he either didn't know or he couldn't remember.
Finally, after several noisy outbursts from the public benches, shouted comments from the defence lawyers, and a pitched verbal battle between the various legal tribes, proceedings were suspended.
"This is not the National Assembly," Jean-Louis Périès reminded participants.
- Meaningless media frenzy greets Abdeslam who takes the stand to say nothing new
- Abdeslam lawyer mocks Belgian police, insists on her right to criticise incompetence
On the resumption, Salah Abdeslam's team explained that, in the light of the court president's acceptance of what they called "a line of prejudicial questioning", the president's toleration of shouted comments from the public benches, and the generally negative atmosphere, they were unwilling to continue.
Abdeslam's team then left the courtroom, followed by the entire squad of 50-odd other lawyers who are defending the various accused.
Proceedings were abandoned for the day.
The trial, which has already accumulated four weeks of Covid-related delays, is scheduled to resume on Wednesday afternoon.
