Parisian assassin threatened with remaining life in prison

Salah Abdeslam, who was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for his role in the November 2015 Paris attacks, is the sole surviving member of the terrorist cell that massacred 130 people in the French capital.

Abdeslam was sentenced to life imprisonment with little chance of parole after 30 years, only the fifth time in French legal history such a sentence has been handed down.

Born in Brussels with a long criminal record, he was also a party and casino smoker before he fell under the spell of radical Islam.

The court heard how he and his older brother Brahim transitioned from a life of drugs and crime in the Belgian capital’s crime-ridden Molenbeek district to a dream of an Islamic caliphate.

The couple ran a seedy local bar, Les Beguines, which was a meeting place for traders before becoming a secret place to watch extreme IS videos after the group seized territories in Iraq and Syria from 2014.

“I tell you: we fought France, we attacked France. We targeted the population, the civilian population, but in reality it was nothing personal against these people,” an unrepentant Abdeslam said in September as the trial opened, parrying ISIS propaganda.

His descent into the Islamist death cult came under the influence of his childhood friend Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who became a key ISIS recruiter and ringleader in the Paris attacks.

In February 2015, Brussels police summoned Abdeslam to speak about Abaaoud, who appeared in a gruesome video from Syria showing him driving a pick-up truck hauling mutilated bodies to a mass grave.

“Aside from jihad, he’s a good guy,” Abdeslam said during an interview, hiding his own plans to follow other locals from Molenbeek to Syria.

Over the course of the nine-month Paris trial, the former tram technician changed in appearance, dropping his early bravery and defiance to become more outwardly contrite.

He blamed his early behavior on his prison conditions – solitary confinement with 24-hour video surveillance since his arrest in March 2016.

“When I arrived in this environment after six years of isolation, during which I was prevented from speaking to anyone, it was a social shock,” he said, adding that he was “a little bit difficult with words and I regret it”.

In April, after refusing to testify for months, he said he would hold himself accountable to prove he wasn’t “the monster without humanity” he was made out to be.

According to his version of events, he was approached by Abaaoud to take part in the Paris attacks two days before being deployed as a suicide bomber.

“It was a shock to me,” he told the court, but “in the end I accepted.”

After dropping three bombers in front of the National Stadium that night, he was scheduled to detonate himself at a bar in the capital’s trendy 18th district.

“I go to the coffee shop, order a drink, look at the people around me and say to myself, ‘No, I’m not doing that,'” he told the court.

He threw his suicide vest in a bin and fled back to Brussels, where he was on the run for four months.

His brother Brahim accepted his mission and gunned down young people in cafes before blowing himself up.

Prosecutors pointed out inconsistencies in his report and also pointed to handwritten letters full of grammatical errors that he had written while in hiding.

“My dear younger sister, I can imagine it must be difficult for you to be separated from your two brothers and everyone calls us terrorists too. Understand that we only terrorized infidels,” he wrote.

In April, Abdeslam sobbed and asked for forgiveness in court after weeks of survivors testifying about her loss and injuries.

In his closing statement, he asked the judges not to punish him for the crimes of others and tried to emphasize that he had not killed anyone himself.

“I made mistakes, that’s true. But I’m not a killer, I’m not a killer,” he said.

Observers wondered if the man had seen the light early in the trial, after coming face-to-face with the people his actions had harmed.

“They are still human beings who did unspeakable things, but they are still human beings so I assume they were affected,” survivor Bruno Poncet told AFP of Abdeslam and the 13 other defendants in court.

“I think that Salah Abdeslam behaved like a terrorist, that his brother was a terrorist and that he was still a terrorist even after the incident,” lawyer Gerard Chemla, who acted on behalf of the victims, told AFP.

“The rest leaves me rather indifferent after that.”