The trial of five jihadists accused of the kidnappings in Syria of four French journalists, and the perpetration of "acts of torture and barbarity", opened in Paris on Monday after almost ten years of investigations.
The journalists – radio reporter Didier François, freelance photographer Édouard Elias, Nicolas Hénin, Middle East bureau chief for Solas Films and freelance photographer Pierre Torres – were kidnapped by the jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (later called Islamic State) in June 2013.
Members of the family of British aid worker David Haines, who was held alongside the French hostages, are present at the trial as civil parties to the case, as is also his Italian colleague and fellow captive Federico Motka. The pair were kidnapped in March 2013. Amid speculation of a ransom payment, the following year all four of the French journalists were released. Haines was decapitated by his captors in September 2014.
The hostages were held most of the time in a hospital taken over by the jihadists in the Syrian town of Aleppo. Surviving captives of the jihadists have detailed the horrific torture administered at the disused eye hospital, and severe and systematic beatings. Recovered CCTV footage from the building would reveal how they were abused in the basement.
Just three of the accused are present at the trial, which will last until March 21st. The two others are believed to have been killed in Syria, but they were nevertheless charged because there is no formal proof of their deaths.
Among the three who will appear are Mehdi Nemmouche, 39, currently serving a life sentence for a 2014 shooting attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels which left four people dead, and fellow French national Abdelmalek Tanem, 34, who was handed a nine-year jail sentence for jihadist activity on his return to France from Syria in 2014. Both face life sentences if found guilty.
Present alongside them is Kais al-Abdallah, a Syrian national charged with kidnapping and detaining French journalists Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres, for which he faces a maximum jail sentence of 20 years if convicted. All three deny the charges.
In an uninvited declaration while confirming his identity at the start of the trial on Monday, a cleanshaven Nemmouche told the court “I have never been the jailer of Western hostages, nor any others”, and claimed that he had instead been a “frontline soldier” fighting the army of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“I never met these people in Syria,” he added, referring to the French journalists, three of whom were present. But the evidence to be heard at the trial tells a very different story.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The missing two are French national Salim Benghalem and Belgian national Oussama Atar who it is believed may have died in fighting in Syria at the end of 2017. Atar was handed a full-term life sentence after a Paris court found him guilty, in absentia, of organising the November 13th 2015 terrorist attacks in the French capital which left 130 people dead.
The civil parties (plaintiffs) are the four journalists, along with Motka and the family of David Haines. Other hostages, who included the Spanish journalist Marcos Marginedas Izquierdo, could register as civil parties during the trial.
A total of 64 witnesses have been summoned to attend, including several people who have been key figures in terrorist activity over the past ten years. Three of them are serving life sentences; Peter Cherif, who organised the logistics for the January 2015 shooting attack on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo; Tyler Vilus, reputedly the most dangerous and most experienced French jihadist still alive, and Alexanda Kotey, a former British and now stateless jihadist serving eight life sentences in the US. Also called to testify is Mourad Farès, serving a 22-year jail sentence in France for recruiting dozens of young men to join jihadist ranks in Syria.
Another witness will be former French president François Hollande, already present at previous terrorism-related trials. It is unclear what his testimony is expected to reveal.
In their final document requesting the five stand trial, the French anti-terrorism prosecution services, the PNAT, underlined “the systemisation of the ill treatment and the cruelty of the torture imposed upon the captives will mark [people’s] minds, just like also the fate of those who would not be freed and end up savagely assassinated by decapitation in propaganda videos which would circulate the world over” aim at “terrorising all the non-partisans, both Syrian and foreign”.
Between November 2nd 2012 and January 2nd 2014, a total of 25 people of 14 different nationalities, either journalists or aid workers, were taken hostage by the group that renamed itself Islamic State (IS). The kidnappings were mostly premeditated. Typically, targets would be picked out after surveillance and intercepted by armed jihadists on a deserted road. The hostages would then be transferred to the Amniyat, which the PNAT described as an IS “counter-espionage service”, and whose activities were revealed by Mediapart in 2017.
French journalists Didier François and Édouard Elias were kidnapped in Aleppo, while Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torres were taken hostage in Raqqa, in north-central Syria. Aid workers David Haines and Federico Motka were captured close to a refugee camp near to the border with Turkey, in Syria's north-west Idlib province.
Haines and Motka were initially placed under the guard of the notably vicious British group of four Islamic State thugs nicknamed “the Beatles” (see further below), but were transferred after four months to the hospital in Aleppo, where they were joined by the French hostages and all other captives.
The jihadists running the disused hospital, and who included the five accused at the trial which opened on Monday in Paris, carried out systematic torture of their prisoners. Those who survived captivity would recount beatings with truncheons and metal chains. Some captives had objects forced into their anus, others were made to wear tear-gas-soaked blindfolds for several days. Some had nails ripped out with pliers, and others were administered electric shocks. There were waterboarding sessions and mock executions. “I clearly heard the cries of torture victims and the torturers’ cries of rage in French,” recalled Nicolas Hénin, who, like his colleagues also suffered beatings and abuse.
As the hospital became targeted during the battle of Aleppo, the hostages were transferred to an oil refinery in desert land where they arrived in February 2014. There they were back under the control of the so-called “Beatles”. There were multiple negotiations with governments over the payment of ransoms for some of the hostages.
The four French journalists were freed by their IS captors on April 12th 2014, when they were driven to the border with Turkey. They arrived back in France two days later, and were met when their plane touched down at Villacoublay airfield near Paris by then French president François Hollande. According to Alexander Kotey, one of the so-called “Beatles”, France paid a ransom of around 2 million euros per hostage. Questioned, Hollande declared “The state does not pay ransoms.”
Tracking down the accused
One and a half monthsafter the release of the French hostages, Mehdi Nemmouche was arrested in Brussels after shooting dead four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. His photo was published widely in the media and Nicolas Hénin, one of the four French hostages, recognised Nemmouche as one of his captors at the hospital in Aleppo. He contacted the French domestic intelligence services, the DGSI, and subsequently the three other journalists who were held hostage confirmed that Nemmouche had indeed been at the hospital.
Several months later, and based on evidence collected in a separate case, the DGSI informed the French prosecution services that it believed Salim Benghalem and Abdelmalek Tanem may have also been among the captors of the Western hostages.
During the close to ten years of the subsequent judicial investigation, the case file grew significantly. The judge in charge of the probe, Bertrand Grain, travelled to the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands and Turkey to question both jihadists and former hostages while, via the European judicial cooperation agency EUROJUST, he also received the help of investigators in Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden.
Abdelmalek Tanem had been arrested in Spain as he attempted to escape to Algeria in April 2014. Extradited to France, he was handed a nine-year jail sentence for being part of a jihadist network. The evidence collected in that case established that while in Syria he frequented Salim Benghalem and Mehdi Nemmouche.
The former hostages who were questioned about Tanem said they did not recognise his face, but believed they recognised his voice.
Kais al-Abdallah, aka ‘Abou Hamza TNT’
It was on November 25th 2019 that Pierre Torres informed the French investigation of the presence in Germany of Syrian IS member Kais al-Abdallah, who he identified as an accomplice in the kidnapping of himself and Nicolas Hénin in the town of Raqqa, in northern Syria, on June 22nd 2013.
One year earlier, Torres had been contacted via the encrypted messaging service Signal by a person he did not know, and who introduced themselves as a member of a group of Syrian activists who were seeking the arrest of a jihadist who was hiding in Germany. After some hesitation, Torres agreed to a meeting in the spring of 2018 in Lebanon. “In the street I met a person who seemed to me to be of Syrian origin and who spoke mediocre English,” he recounted “She showed me a photo and I immediately recognised Abou Hamza.”
This was not the Muslim cleric extradited to the US from Britain and now serving a life sentence for terrorism, but rather Abou Hamza al-Kimawi (“the chemist”), also known as Abou Hamza TNT.
After a few months, the Syrian activists subsequently sent Torres and Hénin a file of information about the man in the photo, whose real name was Kais al-Abdallah, and which Torres passed on to Bertrand Grain. The judge’s enquiries established that Kais al-Abdallah was a chemistry student before the advent of the Syrian revolution in early 2011. He became knowledgeable in the handling of explosives, and is suspected of producing car-bombs for the IS group. Grain also discovered that in 2015 he obtained refugee status in Germany, where he resumed his studies in chemistry.
On April 24th 2019, French daily Libération published two articles about Abdallah, and which prompted a Syrian woman refugee in France, whose husband was a Marxist opponent who disappeared after being kidnapped by the jihadists, to contact the DGSI. She recounted how Abdallah had been a neighbour of hers in Raqqa, and that she believed he was a member of the IS.
Judge Grain questioned Nicolas Hénin’s Syrian fixer, who said that Abdallah was reputedly responsible for multiple kidnappings. Extradited to France, Abdallah denied involvement in the kidnappings of the French journalists. “On the opposite, I helped the journalists,” he said under questioning, a claim dismissed by Hénin and Torres.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In parallel to Judge Grain’s investigation in France, another was opened in the US into the murders of Western hostages, including four Americans, by the IS cell of four jihadists with British accents who some hostages had nicknamed “the Beatles”.
One of them, Mohammed Emwazi, aka “Jihadi John”, a British national born in Kuwait to Iraqi parents and who grew up in London, produced propaganda videos in which he featured himself beheading hostages. They included aid workers David Haines and Alain Henning, US aid worker Peter Kassig and US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Emwazi died in a joint US and British drone attack in Raqqa in November 2015, one day before an IS cell carried out the mass shooting attacks in Paris on November 13th.
Emwazi’s British cohorts, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, were captured in January 2018 by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces who handed them over to the US, where the pair were tried in March 2022 and given eight life sentences without parole. Both were stripped of their British nationalities in 2018.
As Mediapart has previously revealed, Kotey gave US interrogators a detailed account (subsequently confirmed by Elsheikh) about the hostage-taking and the roles of those involved, and also about the activities of Mehdi Nemmouche and Oussama Atar, who negotiated ransoms. In March 2022, Kotey repeated his testimony to a visiting French delegation made up of Judge Grain, public prosecutor Benjamin Chambre (who is presenting the prosecution case at the trial which opened in Paris on Monday), and also DGSI officers, who had travelled to question him in detention in Virginia. Kotey’s confessions came as part of an agreement whereby he pleaded guilty and in return may be allowed to serve just 15 years in a US jail after which he would be transferred to Britain to see out the rest of his life sentence.
The French investigation led by Judge Grain was initially completed at the end of 2022. But new evidence led the public prosecution services to request further investigations. This was provided by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an NGO that seeks out evidence of a wide range of crimes, from war crimes to terrorism, to help in the prosecution of their perpetrators. The CIJA handed the French investigation a hard disc containing 2,860 hours of video recordings from CCTV cameras in the Aleppo hospital block, which was used by IS as the main detention centre of Western hostages.
The DGSI studied the images, which showed armed and hooded jihadists and blindfolded prisoners, their heads bowed, being beaten. Some were chained and suspended for whole days in a corridor of the hospital’s basement. Amid the mass of footage, the DGSI officers identified Salim Benghalem, Mehdi Nemmouche and Abdelmalek Tanem who appeared in the images unmasked. In one sequence, Benghalem and Nemmouche are seen fastening cable ties on one of their prisoners while shouting orders to other jailers. In other images, Nemmouche and Abdelmalek Tanem are holding assault rifles. Tanem offered no comment when questioned about the video by French investigators in February 2023.
-------------------------
- The original article in French can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse
