The day before, the first witness of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, an investigator from the anti-terrorism sub-directorate, had remained standing for four hours to methodically unfold his presentation of the French investigation using PowerPoint slides. On Tuesday September 14, the Brussels investigating judge Isabelle Panou preferred to sit down to take the special court of assize into the Belgian maze of this labyrinthine case. She sat down on a chair and put her grimoire in front of her: a thick binder containing part of the recent history of Belgian jihadism, the pages of which she will slowly turn over during the five hours of her testimony.
The magistrate, one of the finest connoisseurs of Islamist networks in her country, was seized of the investigation into the Parisian attacks barely a few hours after the Bataclan massacre. In front of the auditorium, a mobile phone found in a trash can and a rental vehicle registered in Belgium quickly directed the investigations to its territory. “This is the most difficult file I have had to deal with, an emotional file. The facts took place in Paris, but the emotion did not stop at the borders, she confides. Within hours, Belgium appeared. We had to cooperate. “
In the five years that she has been investigating this investigation, Mr.me Panou learned to discover the actors: “Twelve of the fourteen defendants present here have visited my office. ” But in the hours following the Paris attacks, a much more familiar name will come back to haunt her, that of a ghost she chases from file to file: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the Paris attacks. This one has never been to his office. “On November 13, I did not know the name of Salah Abdeslam [seul membre encore en vie des commandos]. The only name I knew was Abaaoud Abdelhamid. I never saw it. But I stalked him for years. Let’s talk about Abaaoud… ”
“Abaaoud escaped the French, the Greeks, the Belgians”
The figure of this Belgian jihadist, killed in Saint-Denis five days after the attacks, will cross like a shadow the deposition of the magistrate. First missed meeting: an investigation into a Belgian departure network in Syria, that of Khalid Zerkani. This Brussels preacher, “Nicknamed” Papa Noël “so much money was falling out of his pockets”, transported between 2012 and 2014 around twenty young Belgians in the Iraqi-Syrian zone. Among the actors of this network were three members of the cell of the attacks of Paris and Saint-Denis: Abdelhamid Abaaoud (who will be condemned for these facts to twenty years of prison in absence in July 2015), but also Chakib Akrouh, member of the commando Parisian terraces, and Najim Laachraoui, the pyrotechnician of explosive belts.
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