Five suspected Islamist terrorists accused of kidnapping and torturing four French journalists covering the war in Syria have gone on trial in Paris.
The men include the French jihadi Mehdi Nemmouche, 39, who is serving life imprisonment for an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014 in which four people died.
The five are charged with being part of an Islamic State group that held the journalists, as well as dozens of others including humanitarian workers, between 2013 and 2014.
On Monday, as he appeared in court to give his name, Nemmouche denied having been the journalists’ captor. “I was never the jailer of the western hostages or any other hostage, and I never met these people in Syria,” he told the Paris court, breaking his silence after not speaking throughout the Brussels trial or during the investigation.
All four journalists have told investigators they are sure Nemmouche was their jailer.
During what is seen as a historic trial in Europe, the court will hear details of the psychological and physical torture allegedly inflicted on the journalists, as well as the wider general treatment of hostages by the IS group in Syria, where 27 western reporters and humanitarian workers were kidnapped between 2012 and 2014.
Eight were killed – three Americans, two Britons, two Japanese and a Russian – while three others, including two women, remain missing, presumed dead.
The foreign correspondent Didier François and the photographer Édouard Elias were working for the French radio station Europe 1 when they were kidnapped near Aleppo on 6 June 2013, shortly after crossing into Syria from Turkey.
Two weeks later Nicolas Hénin, a reporter with Le Point magazine, and the photographer Pierre Torres were taken hostage by armed and masked men in the city of Raqqa. All four were released in April 2014 after 10 months in captivity.
The trial that opened in Paris on Monday comes after French investigators carried out a 10-year inquiry stretching across more than a dozen countries.
In the dock alongside Nemmouche are Abdelmalek Tanem, 35, a French national accused of being another IS jailer, and a Syrian man, Kais Al Abdallah, 41, who is accused of having helped the terror group to kidnap the journalists. Both have denied the charges. Another two are being tried in absentia.
The prosecutor’s office accuses the five of running a “hostage factory” and “torture training centres” in which those being held were subject to psychological and physical punishment.
On his release François recounted how Nemmouche had crushed his fingers and pulled out his nails. Hénin said the jihadi had made him kneel in front of a wall and prepare to be decapitated.
Hénin said the IS cell treated Syrian captives even worse than the westerners. “The Syrian prisoners were terrified of being tortured by the jihadists who would scream at them in French,” he said, adding that local prisoners were often suspended on hooks and had their throats cut.
“We asked ourselves if we would be next, they said we would end up having our heads cut off,” Hénin added.
The former hostages told investigators they had recognised Nemmouche as one of their jailers, who had called himself Abu Omar, when he was arrested after the bombing in Belgium and his photograph circulated in the press.
They told police Nemmouche was “talkative”, “perverse” and “committed to religious ethnic cleansing”.
A number of other convicted jihadis, including one in jail in the US, are expected to give evidence in the trial, which will continue for five weeks.
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