Hours before the verdict was handed down, on Monday, Mohamed Medjdoub, a 29-year-old Algerian man, told the court that his terrorist attack was a ‘total success’ and he had ‘no regrets.’
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Until the final day, a psychiatrist’s and a psychologist’s reports were necessary to understand Mohamed Medjdoub’s personality, as he had remained locked up in silence throughout his trial. At the Special Criminal Court in Paris, the experts described the young man as “narcissistic,” “self-centered,” full of his own “grandiosity,” radicalized to a “total” degree, driven by his “contempt” and hatred for “infidels” and, without a shadow of a doubt, “dangerous.”
On Monday, April 7, in the morning, just before the judges retired to deliberate, Medjdoub, an Algerian former computer science student, who was on trial for a homemade bomb attack that had injured about 15 people, in a pedestrian alley in central Lyon, on May 24, 2019, spoke for the first time. He had not uttered a single word nor even glanced at the court over the six days of hearings. He appeared to be just as the experts had described: narcissistic, fully radicalized, and dangerous.
After briefly mentioning the “France of the Crusaders,” which he said he had “contempt” for, the accused insisted, as if trying to convince himself, that his “operation” had been a “total success” – even calling it “perfection from start to finish.” “All the objectives were achieved,” he emphasized, though it was unclear what they were, before clarifying: “I’m not saying this to flatter my ego”
