This has been the week of the Clain family at the Paris attacks trial. On Tuesday, a police witness described the careers of Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, directors of the IS propaganda effort, both presumed dead in Syria. On Wednesday, the court heard evidence from one of the Clain sisters and a niece, separately imprisoned in France.
The sister, Anne Clain, testified by videolink from the penitentiary at Réau on the outskirts of Paris, where she is serving nine years for aiding a terrorist enterprise.
She was arrested after having attempted to reach the Syrian war zone with her husband and four of their children. She is 46 years old.
She was polite, cooperative and articulate.
Opening her testimony, she said she was disappointed that her brothers were "part of that monstrosity," presumably a reference to the Islamic State terror organisation for which Fabien and Jean-Michel worked as propaganda specialists.
Fabien Clain's was the voice which claimed IS responsibility for the November Paris attacks.
Conversion from Catholicism
Anne Clain agreed that the entire family had converted from luke-warm Catholicism to fundamentalist Islam in a remarkably short time.
She explained that the close-knit group, disappointed by contradictions in the Bible, had been looking for a spiritual dimension. In the late-'90s, they found it in the version of Islam enthusiastically adopted by Fabien Clain, who quickly converted all the others. They moved inevitably towards a rigorous Salafism.
The Caliphate being established by Islamic State in Syria-Iraq then seemed like the only place for sincere Muslims to practice their religion.
Anne Clain admitted that, at the time, she had felt the Charlie Hebdo killings were justified.
"For us, it was unthinkable that someone could make fun of the Prophet."
She claimed not to have known about the Hyper Cacher killings. "We didn't have access to the media. We didn't know everything."
The place of women
She described life as a sort of spiritual pressure cooker, a closed community which unquestioningly accepted a strict interpretation of the Koran.
Anne Clain said she had had no problem with her reduced status as a woman. "The men decided. They were the authority figures.
"I've changed my opinion since," she added with a wry smile.
Anne Clain continues to regard herself as a Muslim, even if, "for the people down there, I'm just an unbeliever".
Now she realises that the folly of indoctrination led her entire family to ruin.
Her mother died in Syria; her two brother are presumed dead; her daughter Fanny and Fabien's wife, Mylène Foucre, are in a refugee camp in northern Iraq; at least seven of the clan perished in the effort to find a place to live as "real Muslims".
"We were the victims of an ideology," Anne Clain finally admitted. "I don't know what to say about the roles my brothers played. It's very difficult to accept that they were terrorists."
Critics of the Caliphate
Then it was the turn of Anne Clain's daughter, Jennifer, to testify. Jennifer Clain spoke from the prison at Beauvais in northern France where she is awaiting trial on charges connected with her own stay in Syria. She is 30 years old.
She has five children, having been married at the age of 15 to a man chosen by her uncle, Fabien Clain. Her husband is currently imprisoned in Iraq.
Jennifer Clain said she shared her mother's impression of having lived in a closed environment, impervious to questions or criticism.
"It was dangerous to ask too many questions," she said of daily life under Islamic State rule in Syria. "But I had doubts right from the start.
"It's hard to admit to yourself that you might have made the wrong choice. I gave up everything to go there. But there were obvious contradictions. There were leaders more interested in their own profit than in God.
"But we kept our negative opinions to ourselves."
As for the desolation of the clan Clain, Jennifer had a chillingly straight answer: "we are all responsible for what we wanted," she explained. "We are guilty of what we believed."
The trial continues.
