The hearing had only just begun a few minutes ago, but the tone was set. Upon entering the dock at the Nord Assize Court in Douai on Friday, October 17th, Seddik Benbahlouli refused to sit down and began shouting. The presiding judge tried to adopt a conciliatory tone, but nothing worked. The 55-year-old man, with a receding hairline and a thick beard, tried to force his way out. Restrained by five police officers, he was removed from the courtroom. The jurors had not yet been selected. They watched the scene, stunned. He would not be seen again for the rest of the day.
Justice had been waiting for him for twenty-nine years. In 2001, when he was tried in absentia along with three other members of what would go down in history as the “Roubaix Gang” – he had been sentenced to twenty years in that trial – they had already lost his trail. His DNA was found in January 1996 in a parking lot near Roubaix (Nord), following shots fired with a military-grade weapon at police officers staking out a stolen car. One of them, seriously injured, had miraculously escaped death.
For three months, a series of robberies followed, a volatile mix of extreme violence and amateurism, as well as an attempted bombing in Lille. The detonator had malfunctioned. “That bomb could have destroyed the entire neighborhood within a 200-meter radius,” the presiding judge reminded the court.
“He Didn’t Speak”
Who is this man about whom almost nothing is known? Since his arrest in 2023 in the United States, where he was living under a false identity, and his return to France, Seddik Benbahlouli has remained silent. “He denies all the charges against him,” stated his lawyer, before an empty dock. It’s not easy to defend someone who did not accept his 2001 conviction and wanted a new trial. Especially since he no longer wants to appear in court.
Called to testify, one of his brothers didn’t have much to say. Their parents? An Algerian father who was a textile worker and a stay-at-home mother whom he described as “strict. They didn’t try to understand.” A non-practicing family that saw this son and brother frequent the mosque more and more assiduously, becoming very religious, to the point of demanding that in the family home, everything on the walls be taken down, that they sit on the floor, and that tobacco be banned. As for the rest? “He didn’t speak, nothing at all.”