On Wednesday, the Paris attacks trial heard from Bernard Cazeneuve and François Mollins, the first a former government minister, the second a former attorney general who launched the investigation into the November 2015 killings. Both admitted that mistakes had been made. Neither knew who was to blame for those mistakes.
"Radical Islam is a form of totalitarianism. The aim is to abolish liberty, tolerance of others, the very idea of an open society. There can be no explanation or justification for such an ideology. The objective is to wreak desolation in the most violent way imaginable."
The words were those of Bernard Cazeneuve, French Interior Minister at the time of the attacks.
Earlier he told the court that the emotion he felt as he watched the injured being evacuated from the Bataclan had almost overwhelmed him. He chose to conceal his feelings as a human being in order to function more efficiently as the head of the French security forces.
The former minister also admitted that he continues to be haunted by the question of what could have been done better to prevent the killings.
Police errors at European level
The French intelligence services were actively interested in 941 potential or known terrorists at the time of the attacks, the minister explained.
Two of the November 2015 murderers, Sami Amimour and Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, were under a high level of police scrutiny as suspected Islamic radicals. Amimour was, however, able to leave France for Syria and return to Europe, despite being under judicial control.
Mostefaï also left for Syria and returned unhindered. He was on a police watch list because of his association with a Salafist mosque in the city of Chartres.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attacks and one of the terrace murderers, seems to have been able to circulate freely between the Syrian war zone and several European destinations, despite his notorious participation in Islamic State propaganda films. He evaded French, Belgian and Greek police before being killed in Paris just four days after the November massacres.
Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the terror squads and one of the defendants in this trial, notoriously passed untroubled through a police checkpoint on his way back to Belgium on the morning after the Paris killings.
"I did what I could. I tried to act for the best," Bernard Cazeneuve told the hearing. "But that did not stop the attacks, lives were destroyed, French families left inconsolable . . . I'll face that question for the rest of my life."
Clear answers to two crucial questions
Cazeneuve was clear and categorical on two questions which have recurred over the eleven weeks since this trial began.
"I never received any note warning that the Bataclan was a specific target for an attack," the former minister said. "Obviously, if I had been warned, I would have taken the steps necessary to protect the venue."
And the soldiers of the Sentinelle anti-terrorist force, who were on duty outside the Bataclan on the night of the attacks, were right not to have become involved.
"Saving hostages is a difficult undertaking. It's the work of specialised police units.
"The soldiers in Sentinelle are not trained to deal with hostage-takers. They are trained to act to defend themselves. That's why they have weapons. That's the law."
System swamped by scale of attacks
François Mollins who, as French Attorney General in November 2015, launched the investigation into the crimes committed on that tragic night, explained the difficulties faced by the security services in the hours immediately after the attacks.
There were eight separate crime scenes, at least three terrorists on the run, 130 bodies to be identified, dozens of seriously injured victims needing urgent treatment, and a vast investigation to be launched before crucial evidence was lost forever.
The various systems put in place in anticipation of such an attack failed because no one had envisaged such a level of carnage.
The police information phone line quickly became saturated. Families were left to wander from hospital to hospital all night because no one was centralising information about the names of the dead and injured. The inter-ministerial victim support unit couldn't cope. There was nowhere for families rushing to Paris to go. Confusion was total
"I am all too aware of the unbearable, insupportable suffering those failures caused."
The trial continues.
