HEARING REPORT – Sentences of 7 to 14 years were requested against the three defendants present in the box at the trial of the assassination of Father Hamel.
“If you speak, you die, if you are silent, you die. So say and die.” Tahar Djaout was an Algerian leftist intellectual who was shot twice in the head in 1993. Monday, at the time of the pleadings of the civil parties in the trial of the attack of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, his memory was invited to the debates by Me Méhana Mouhou, lawyer for Guy Coponet. Brutalized, stabbed, Father Hamel chose to “say” in the face of death and his killer. “He was scared, he was in pain, recalled Me Catherine Fabre, lawyer for the Diocese of Rouen and the Archbishop of Rouen, Mgr Lebrun. But by saying ‘Go away, Satan!’ he did not lament, he did not panic, he rejected evil, he was in another fight”.
Read alsoArchbishop Lebrun at the trial of the Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray attack: “A martyr is at the service of life”
The memory of Djaout has also come to underline that the death of Jacques Hamel was preceded by so many others, and in particular in Algeria by so many Catholic monks, whereas, adds Me Mouhou, “we looked elsewhere and let political Islam enter the minds (of the younger generations)”. Jacques…
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