France

Seven men and one woman will go on trial on Monday over the 2016 Bastille Day attack in the French city of Nice, in which 86 people were killed and hundreds injured by a gunman who drove a heavy truck into a crowd gathered to watch fireworks.

The gunman, responsible for one of the deadliest massacres in peacetime France, was shot dead by police on the spot, ending an assault that shocked a country already reeling from the Islamist attacks in Paris the previous year.

Prosecutors say the accused, who face between five years in jail to a life sentence, helped 31-year-old Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel obtain weapons, rent the truck or survey the route he took for his deadly rampage.

French writer André Malraux said it: “A civilization is everything that gathers around a religion”. And when one religion declines, another takes its place.

Sarcelles, Saint-Denis, Mulhouse, Nantes, Chambéry, Strasbourg, La Rochelle… The impressive images of stadiums full of Muslim faithful, who arrived from all over France for the feast of Eid Al Kabir, seventy days after the end of Ramadan. In Saint-Denis, the city where the kings of France rest; in Nantes, the city of the Dukes of Brittany; in Strasbourg, the city of the cathedral and seat of the European Parliament, in Mulhouse, in the heart of Alsace.

“In forty years, France has become the Western European nation where the population of Muslim origin is the most important,” wrote Vatican Radio. “It is not difficult to hypothesize that we are now close to Islam overtaking Catholicism.” What if the overtaking has already taken place?

On October 16, 2020, French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an Islamist zealot after showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to his class. Some two weeks later, one hundred French “professors and researchers of various sensitivities” published the “Manifesto of the Hundred” in France’s foremost daily, Le Monde, denouncing French academia’s persistent denial of Islamism and its menace.

It was a trial to match the scale of the crime.

More than 400 survivors and relatives of the dead came forward to bear witness to France’s worst peace-time attack.

Fourteen defendants were questioned in a courtroom specially built for their trial, about the terrorist plot that claimed 130 lives on one night in November 2015.

Nine months of hearings were interspersed with breaks, each week, to allow emotions to settle.

“There has never been a trial like this in our history,” France’s counter-terrorism prosecutor, Jean-François Ricard, said the morning after the verdict.

It was the biggest criminal trial ever held in France, where hundreds of people who survived the deadliest peacetime attack on French soil gave shocking details of their ordeal – from crawling past corpses at Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, to being held hostage by gunmen or ducking Kalashnikov fire at restaurant pavement tables.

Now, after 10 months of harrowing testimony from the victims and the bereaved, judges will return their verdicts on Wednesday. But beyond the sentencing, the trial’s platform for survivors to speak out has been hailed as a crucial step in France facing its collective trauma over the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people and injured more than 490.

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 of you will say I am insincere, that this is a strategy … as if apologies could be insincere given so much suffering,” Abdeslam, 32, added.

France’s highest administrative court has upheld a ban on full-body “burkini” swimsuits in public pools, rejecting an appeal by the city of Grenoble.

Last month, Grenoble authorised all swimwear, including burkinis, sparking a legal battle with the government.

Burkinis are worn largely by Muslim women as a way of preserving modesty and upholding their faith.

But the court said it could not allow “selective exceptions to the rules to satisfy religious demands”.

… “The death of Alban Gervaise relegated to the pages of various news outlets”. Thus the Causeur magazine summarizes the ghastly story from Marseille. Military doctor Alban Gervaise was stabbed in the throat a dozen times while his murderer cried “Allahu Akbar” as the doctor went to bring his 3 and 7-year-old children to their Catholic school. The attacker’s name is Mohammed.

Why so much silence? “Rejection. Cowardice. Complicity. Collaborationism”. So writes Sarah Cattan in La Tribune de Juive. “Why did the death of Alban Gervaise, slaughtered in front of the school where he had just taken his two children aged 3 and 7, remain in the information substrate?”

Champions League Final: Harrowing accounts of post-match violence spark debate

A week has gone by but the stadium “fiasco” remains a hot issue in France, with new and harrowing accounts about the breakdown in law and order when the match had come to an end.

Among Liverpool fans whose translated testimony has been circulating widely on social media is UFC fighter Paddy Pimblett, who said he had “never been so scared in my life … as when I came out of that ground on Saturday night”.

“At least when you are in a cage it is one against one,” the mixed martial artist said.

“There were groups of 30 men, running around in big packs. Some of them had weapons: machetes, knives, bars and bats. People were being pinned to the floor and having their watches taken.

“Carnage” at the Stade de France: hundreds of “young people” and migrants attacked, chased and robbed English and Spanish supporters, the police report sexual assaults

Stade de France is located the banlieue of Saint Denis. You know who the “Yutes” are.