Five years after the Islamist attacks that cost a gendarmerie officer his life, the trial against the terrorism co-conspirators opened in Paris this week.
Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame died at the hands of terrorists in the Islamist attacks in Trèbes and Carcassonne in March 2018 after exchanging himself for a hostage. The freed hostage explained that she had found faith through the sacrifice of Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame.
The trial opened on Monday, January 22nd, in Paris, and is due to last a month. It involves trying those involved in terrorist attacks that took place on 23 March 2018, in the south of France—in Aude, Carcassonne, and in a supermarket in the town of Trèbes, a few kilometres away.
The terrorist, Radouane Ladkim, was a Moroccan, naturalised French in 2004. His hostage-taking was motivated by the demand for the release of Salah Abdeslam, who was involved in the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015. Ladkim entered a supermarket and initially took a young cashier, Julie Grand, hostage before freeing her at the request of Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, who took her place—against all the usual procedures.
The sequence of terrorist attacks, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, left five people dead and around fifteen injured. The dead included the terrorist himself, who was shot dead by the GIGN (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale), and Beltrame, whose throat was slit by the terrorist a few minutes before the final assault.
Today, seven people associated with Ladkim are on trial for “terrorist criminal association.” Among them is a young woman, engaged at the time to Ladkim, but above all, a certain El Yaakoubi, a gang leader in the Ozanam neighbourhood in Carcassonne, where Ladkim lived. Officially an honest construction worker and president of the local football club, he had been identified as a member of Ladkim’s entourage and, as a result, had been under surveillance by the anti-terrorist investigation unit. It emerged that he was dealing drugs and associating with a fundamentalist imam.
El Yaakoubi played a decisive operational role in the attacks. In January 2018, the kingpin lent Lakdim a car with interchangeable licence plates, which enabled him to buy a hunting knife from a gun shop in Carcassonne—the knife he used to slit Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame’s throat.
The wiretaps revealed culpable links between El Yaakoubi and the delegate of the Prefect of Aude in a scandalous pact: the civil servant informed the kingpin about planned police operations in the housing estate, and asked in exchange that the latter restore “calm with the young people.” These relations developed in 2019, after the attacks. The civil servant, who is now mayor of a small commune in the south of France, has not yet been charged.
As part of the trial, a previously unpublished recording was released: a sixteen-minute audio file of the dialogue that took place on March 23rd, 2018 between the GIGN negotiator and the terrorist Lakdim, who was holding Arnaud Beltrame hostage. The death of the gendarme occurred during these sixteen minutes, and listening to the sequence evoked very strong emotion in the court.
For Arnaud Beltrame’s family, defended by lawyer Thierry de Montbrial, the term ‘sacrifice’ to describe the gendarme’s death is inadequate. At the start of the trial, the lawyer said,
Colonel Beltrame did not sacrifice himself; he took the place of a hostage because he thought he could overpower the Islamic terrorist. He went into combat: he is a gendarmerie officer who died in combat, who died for France.
In recent weeks, in the run-up to the trial, the young woman saved by Beltrame has chosen to break her silence. She has just published a book about her terrible experience, soberly entitled Sa vie pour la mienne (His Life for Mine). She talks about the hostage-taking when she was a cashier in the Super U store targeted by Ladkim, the psychological suffering that resulted from this trauma, and the difficulties of being recognised as a victim of terrorism. But the most touching aspect of her experience is her conversion to Catholicism, made possible in some way through the officer who gave his life for her.
In the three years following the hostage-taking, Julie Grand explains that she was drawn into a spiral of failure, from which she emerged by discovering the community of the Canons of Lagrasse, a traditional community frequented by Arnaud Beltrame and his wife. It was at this abbey that she discovered the power of prayer: “It was there that I said my first real prayer”. Praying helped her to overcome the trials she had been through: “I started to get back on track from the moment I started praying. Prayer requires a lot of humility. You have to give a lot of love and ask for positive things.”
Julie Grand was baptised at Lagrasse Abbey in April 2023 and was married religiously a few months later.
“Julie was saved by Arnaud. He died so that she could live. But the colonel had no idea that while he was saving her body, Christ was going to touch her soul”, writes Father Jean-Baptiste Golfier, canon of Lagrasse, who was very close to the officer, having prepared him for marriage, in the afterword to Julie’s book.
The trial is due to last until February 23rd.
