Roissy, Schiphol, “metro”, “18th arrondissement”… The gray areas of the investigation into the November 13 attacks – Le Monde

Major criminal investigations all contain their share of mystery. After four and a half years of investigation, international cooperation involving nineteen countries and several hundred thousand pages of minutes, the dossier of the attacks of November 13, 2015 arrives before justice without having exhausted all its secrets. This piece of judicial anthology has made it possible to trace the chain of responsibility for the most deadly attacks that have struck France in the modern era: twenty defendants are sent back, from Wednesday, September 8, to the special court of assizes in Paris. , including five senior executives of the Islamic State (IS) organization judged by default.

But if “The file architecture is quite clear”, says an investigator interviewed by the World, some gray areas remain. They emerge in particular from several differences between the project imagined by this terrorist cell and the course of the attacks which left 130 dead in Paris and Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis). The questions which arise from this open up an abyss of hypotheses on the role initially assigned to certain defendants in this trial. It is not certain that the debates will elucidate these blind spots, each having an interest in minimizing their role in the operation, anticipates this investigator: ” Corn the answer to all these questions is there, in the box. They know everything. “

• The tree structure of the “November 13” folder

Before exploring the gray areas of this investigation, we must come back to one of his most spectacular discoveries. Four months after the attacks of November 13, 2015, Belgian police got their hands on a computer containing the initial plans for this multi-site attack project. He had been abandoned in a Brussels trash can, on the morning of March 22, 2016, by three still active members of this terrorist cell who were preparing to blow themselves up at Brussels airport in Zaventem – this replica of the Paris attacks made 32 dead in the metro and airport of the Belgian capital.

On the hard drive, the police discover a tree structure detailing the November 13 targets. It makes it possible to understand that only part of the project was carried out. Three commandos – each composed of three attackers – sowed terror in front of the Stade de France, on the terraces of Parisian cafes and at the Bataclan (the tenth man, Salah Abdeslam, gave up his explosive belt before fleeing). But a file entitled “November 13”, found in the computer, contained five sub-files corresponding to the five commandos – and not three – planned that evening:

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