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The last surviving suspected assailant in the deadly 2015 Paris attacks told a court Wednesday that he changed his mind about going through with the killings at the last moment.
“The objective I was given was to go to a cafe in the 18th” district in northern Paris, Salah Abdeslam told the special Paris court hearing the case.
“I’m going into the cafe, I’m ordering a drink, I’m looking at the people around me — and I said to myself: ‘No, I’m not going to do it’,” he added.
For the plaintiffs in the case, including the loved ones of victims of the November 2015 attacks that killed 130 people, this was testimony they had been waiting months to hear.
Abdeslam, 32, said he was told about plans for the attack in Paris on November 11, two days before they were carried out.
That happened at a meeting in Charleroi, in Belgium, with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is accused of having masterminded the attacks.
Until then, said Abdeslam, he thought he was going to be sent to Syria. Instead, he was told he had been chosen to carry out an attack using an explosive belt.
‘A shock for me’
“It was a shock for me, but he ended up by convincing me,” he added.
“I ended up accepting and saying, ‘Okay, I’ll go ahead with it’.”
But at that meeting, he was given no details about the targets for the attack.
When he ultimately did not go through with the attack, he told the court how he took his car and drove around Paris at random until it broke down.
Then he got out and walked, he said, saying his memories of that period were “confused”.
Pressed by the president of the court Jean-Louis Peries, he said only that he knew what he had been supposed to do.
“My brother, he had a belt, a Kalashnikov, I know he’s going to open fire, I know he’s going to blow himself up, but I didn’t know the targets.”
The attackers killed 130 people in suicide bombings and…
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Source : france24
