Scheduled for the start of the year but postponed after a few days due to a lack of available magistrates, the trial of Clément Baur, Mahiedine Merabet and ten other men for a planned attack during the 2017 presidential campaign begins Monday October 30 in Paris.
The trial is therefore starting from scratch, after what was described as a “judicial shipwreck” in January – one of the judges of the special assize court, who was ill, could not be replaced due to a lack of number of magistrates.
The two main accused, Clément Baur, 30, and Mahiedine Merabet, 36, must answer for a planned attack before the 2017 presidential election. Ten other men, nine of whom appear free, suspected of having helped the duo to obtain weapons and ammunition, are tried for terrorist criminal association.
MM. Baur and Merabet were arrested in Marseille on April 18, 2017, five days before the first round of voting. After several days of tracking, investigators from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) managed to locate their hideout.
The two men, who met in prison, had precipitated their fall by seeking to contact, through the Telegram platform, the Islamic State (IS) group to send it a video of allegiance and demands. But it was with an undercover DGSI agent that their video landed. It showed dozens of munitions arranged on a table in such a way as to write “the law of retaliation”, alongside a machine gun, an IS flag and the “front page” of Le Monde on March 16, 2017. with a photo of right-wing candidate François Fillon, followed by a montage of children victims of bombings in Syria.
The search of their hideout resulted in the seizure of the Uzi submachine gun from the video, three pistols, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a bag of bolts. Investigators also discovered more than 3.5 kg of TATP (acetone peroxide), an unstable explosive popular with jihadists already used during the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis.
The exploitation of digital media revealed all-out Internet searches on potential targets: libertine clubs, bars, a kosher restaurant and a Marine Le Pen meeting in Marseille, scheduled for April 19.
“You just have to ‘blow’ them up.”
During the investigation, Mahiedine Merabet, a repeat offender from Roubaix (North), contested any plans for a deadly attack, admitting however to have considered “a coup” by detonating a homemade grenade near the meeting of the candidate of the National Rally. But to “scare”, excluding attacking civilians. During the aborted January trial, he described himself as a “Muslim political prisoner.”
Clément Baur, who accepted his ideological affiliation with IS, assured that he only wanted to cause “material damage” on institutional targets, in retaliation for the strikes in Syria. The conversations intercepted without his knowledge during his visits in prison are more fruitful: “Baghdadi [the former leader of the Islamic State] is right, we must not speak with them, we must just “rafal” them, explode them “, he said in particular.
Clément Baur’s career path is atypical. Born in Val-d’Oise, he converted to Islam at the age of 14 or 15 through contact with the Chechen community in Nice – where he lived with his mother. He taught himself Russian, then Arabic. At 17, he left for Belgium, where he requested asylum under a first false identity. This ace concealer will file other asylum applications in France and Germany, posing as a Chechen refugee. It is precisely for having held false papers that he will be incarcerated with Mahiedine Merabet for a few weeks in Lille.
The two men went into hiding in December 2016 after the administrative search of Merabet’s home, where Clément Baur was located under an alias. Investigators are convinced that during his winding journey Clément Baur frequented the terrorist cell of Verviers, in Belgium, that of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, operational leader of the November 13 commandos, and that he was in contact in Germany with Anis Amri, the perpetrator of the truck attack on the Berlin Christmas market in 2016 (which left twelve people dead). The trial is scheduled until December 1.
