In a protected complex inside a 13th-century court, the trial of 20 men accused of the 2015 Islamic State group attacks in Paris that caused 130 victims, including the Venetian Valeria Solesin, begins today in France, and hundreds of injured.
Nine gunmen and suicide bombers struck within minutes of each other at the French national football stadium, the Bataclan concert hall and Paris restaurants and cafes on November 13, 2015. The lone survivor of that night’s extremist cell, Salah Abdeslam, is the key defendant among those tried for the deadliest attack in France since World War II and is the only one charged with murder. The same Islamist network continued to hit Brussels months later, killing 32 other people.
“They are people of whom I have the greatest contempt, no more than this: they are quite indifferent to me. They don’t scare me, ”he explains to the Gazzettino Luciana Milani, mother of Valeria Solesin, Italian victim of the Bataclan massacre.
“I think – says Milani – that it will be a milestone trial, and I am happy with how France is treating it, with how it is informing us civil parties: it is a substantial fact and not only of respect for the victims and relatives”. Valeria’s death «was an attack on the Western way of life, an attack on being citizens, on the polis, on the community. But I think that the trial – continues Valeria’s mother – will leave this aspect in the background to take root on the facts and on how it was possible to happen ».
The 28-year-old Venetian student was pursuing a PhD in demography at the Sorbonne, and on the night of November 13 she was at the Bataclan with her boyfriend and a couple of friends for the rock band’s concert. Eagles of Death Metal.
After that mourning «both my son and my husband – she says – we tried to be the same as before, we hope to have succeeded. Nobody left us alone, from the city to the institutions. But then there are the moments when you are alone ».