A French court on Wednesday sentenced the sole survivor of the Islamist squad that killed 130 people in a night of carnage in Paris to life in prison, bringing a bit of reconciliation to the survivors and to a country whose psyche has been scarred.
From two years for the “little hands” to life imprisonment for Salah Abdeslam. The sentences are differentiated. Several victims hail a “fair” trial.
It took less than an hour. Less than an hour to read the epilogue of a ten-month trial before the specially composed Assize Court of Paris. It was a little over twenty o’clock, this Wednesday evening, when the president Jean-Louis Périès began reading the verdict of the trial of the November 2015 attacks. His voice, rapid and monotone, contrasted with the good-naturedness he had never lost until then. It was as if these few words he was pronouncing, a summarized version of a full 120-page judgment, were already no longer the main point.
In the packed courtroom, the silence was deafening. A moment for history, dizzying.
