PARIS: Five men went on trial in France on Monday charged with holding four French journalists hostage for Daesh in war-torn Syria more than a decade ago.
Daesh emerged in 2013 in the chaos that followed the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
The militants kidnapped a number of foreign journalists and aid workers before US-backed forces eventually defeated the group in 2019.
Reporters Didier Francois and Edouard Elias, and then Nicolas Henin and Pierre Torres, were abducted 10 days apart while reporting from northern Syria in June 2013.
The journalists were held by Daesh in Aleppo for 10 months until their release in April 2014.
They were found blindfolded with their hands bound in the no-man’s land straddling the border between Syria and Turkiye.
More than a decade later, jailed militant Mehdi Nemmouche, 39, is among five men accused of their kidnapping at a trial to last until March 21.
Nemmouche is already in prison after a Belgian court jailed him for life in 2019 for killing four people at a Jewish museum in May 2014, after returning from Syria.
“I was never the jailer of the Western hostages or any other hostage, and I never met these people in Syria,” Nemmouche told the Paris court, breaking his silence after not speaking throughout the Brussels trial or during the investigation.
All four journalists told investigators they were sure Nemmouche was their jailer.
Henin, in a magazine article in September 2014, recounted Nemmouche, then called Abu Omar, punching him in the face and terrorizing Syrian detainees. He described him as “a self-centered fantasist.”
Also in the dock are Frenchman Abdelmalek Tanem, 35, who has already been sentenced in France for heading to fight in Syria in 2012, and a 41-year-old Syrian called Kais Al-Abdallah, accused of facilitating Henin’s kidnapping. Both have denied the charges.
Belgian militant Oussama Atar, a senior Daesh commander, is being tried in absentia because he is presumed to have died in Syria in 2017. He has already been sentenced to life over attacks in Paris in 2015 claimed by Daesh that killed 130 people, and Brussels bombings by the group that took the lives of 32 others in 2016.
French Daesh member Salim Benghalem, who was allegedly in charge of the hostages, is also on trial though believed to be dead.
