French jihadist Othman Garrido appeared before a Paris court on Monday, accused of acting as an Islamic State executioner in Syria and Iraq, among other charges.
The Frenchman is being prosecuted in connection with the murders of two Iranians during a public execution in Syria in 2015.
Although he partially admitted the charges laid against him, told a special criminal court that he had distanced himself from jihadist ideology since his arrest in 2020.
Suspect denies posing next to beheaded man
Garrido, now 32, said he had joined Islamic State, taken part in some fighting and witnessed a beheading.
However, he denied being the man shown in an undated photograph of a partially masked figure posing with a severed head at his feet beside an unidentified decapitated body. That image is central to a murder charge against him.
Garrido was arrested in Turkey and extradited to France in 2020 after spending eight years in territory straddling Iraq and Syria, where Islamic State imposed a reign of terror between 2014 and 2019.
'I lived in a parallel world'
In his first statement before the special criminal court, he said he had begun a genuine process of self-questioning in 2021 and had “come a long way.”
“I know jihadism very, very well, I grew up in it,” he told the court.
Garrido was born into an ultra-radicalised family led by his father, a French convert to Islam who blew himself up in Syria in 2016.
His two brothers were killed in combat. The whole family — his father, his Moroccan mother, his brothers and two sisters — moved to Syria from 2012.
“I was shaped by it, I lived in a parallel world,” Garrido said.
Defendant wants to ask for forgiveness from victims
An expert heard earlier on Monday said he had been educated only up to the age of 12 and raised in an isolated family cut off from society, with similarities to “cult-like mechanisms.”
Garrido said he now felt the need to be heard and to speak out, adding that he also wanted to ask forgiveness from victims. He denied having played an important role in Islamic State or being “a figure of jihadism.”
Prosecutors, however, accuse him of being a senior member of the group, including membership of the Amni, Islamic State’s internal security service, which he denies.
