According to the medical second opinion ordered Tuesday, January 4 by the specially composed Assize Court, the main defendant recently infected with Covid-19 is able to attend the debates and is not likely to cause a cluster.
After two false starts, the trial of the November 13 attacks should resume in earnest on Tuesday. Suspended for two weeks on the occasion of the end of the year holidays, the hearing was to start again on January 4. But Salah Abdeslam, the main accused, tested positive for Covid-19 on December 27, and was still positive for the virus on that date. On January 6, the specially composed assize court finally postponed the resumption of the hearing, the time to submit Salah Abdeslam, who was not vaccinated for “personal reasonsยป, To a medical second opinion. The only surviving member of the murderous commandos “Is currently cured” and “Since January 3, 2022, in application of the most recent recommendations in force, he is medically and sanitary able to attend hearings of the Assize Court”, concluded the report consulted by Release.
According to the two experts who sign this second opinion, an infectious disease specialist and a pulmonologist, Salah Abdeslam presented with a Covid infection on December 24, 2021. He had tested positive three days later. “In view of the infectious disease of which he was the carrier, no medical measure should be taken apart from symptomatic treatment, treatment which has been prescribed to him”, add the two experts. “Strict compliance with the barrier measures is imposed on him when the hearings resume, but regardless of the infection he presented”, they point out. “The persistence of a positive PCR more than 10 days after the onset of symptoms in an immunocompetent patient, vaccinated or not and having presented a little or moderately symptomatic form of infection with SARS-CoV-2, does not correspond to an excretion viable virus and is therefore not associated with contagiousness’, they insisted.
Fear of a cluster
The supposed contagiousness of Salah Abdeslam was at the heart of the debates last Thursday. Certain lawyers, including on the benches of the civil parties, had expressed the fear of creation of a “Cluster” within the windowless Assize Court, where the accused are seated within a meter of each other. The general counsel, Camille Hennetier, had declared that “To subordinate the resumption of the hearing to a negative PCR of Salah Abdeslam would amount to taking the risk of postponing the trial by several weeks”.
At the end of nearly four months of hearing, the trial must enter a new phase, that of the interrogation on the merits of the file of the 14 defendants present (six others, including five presumed dead, are tried in their absence). On Tuesday, the first to be questioned by the court will be Mohamed Abrini, childhood friend of Salah Abdeslam.