On Thursday, the Paris special criminal court continued the psychiatric profiling of the 14 men being tried on suspicion of various levels of involvement in the November 2015 terrorist killings in the French capital. The spotlight fell, once again, on Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving attacker. He's not mad.
Osama Krayem made a rare appearance in the prisoners' box, only to hear himself described as "uncommunicative" and "evasive".
Krayem, who is accused of planning an attack at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on the day of the Paris massacres, speaks Arabic and Swedish, and has only rudimentary French.
He has been boycotting this trial since November. He shows no signs of mental illness.
His co-accused, Sofien Ayari, was done and dusted in six pages of expert prose, rapidly delivered. He's not mad either. Court president Jean-Louis Périès found the whole thing a bit on the brief side.
The expert witness, testifying by videolink from Brussels, explained that he had not been able to break down the wall behind which Ayari protects his personal emotions.
The psychiatrist learned just enough to conclude that Sofien Ayari is not clinically deranged. "He offered no explanation for the facts of which he stands accused."
Second opinion
Ali El Haddad Asufi, already put through the psycho-psychiatric wringer on Wednesday, got a second opinion from a different Belgian expert. He remains mentally sound, a tad distrustful, slightly self-centred, not a true religious radical.
Haddad's legal team wondered if a subject's religious conviction was any of the psychiatrist's business.
The doctor explained that part of his task was to look for signs of "rigid, extreme thinking" is a patient's profile. He said he had found Haddad's outlook on the question of radicalisation to be "stereotypical" with little intellectual support.
Mohamed Abrini is a different kettle of fish. He's not mad either, but he might be pathologically anti-social.
Abrini is the man who admits to pulling out of both the Paris and Belgian suicide attacks at the very last moment. The psychiatrist suggested that this is typically adolescent behaviour.
"Teenagers love testing their limits, putting themselves at risk," the doctor explained. "Here is a man who, on two separate occasions, went to the edge and then stepped back."
Mohamed Abrini is 38 years old.
He had obviously been deeply affected by the death of a younger brother in Syria, and could constitute a danger to society, the expert concluded.
Abdeslam's mental state
Then it was the turn of Abdeslam, with two psychiatric experts basing their findings on an interview carried out just last November. Ayari, by contrast, was interviewed all of six years ago.
The doctors Zagury and Ballivet proved to be a class act.
"All those who are radicalised are radically radicalised," they assured the court.
We were given a glancing reference to Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann trial with the assertion that "we are here confronted with the banality of evil".
Daniel Zagury went on to explain that "evil is very rarely committed in the name of evil. It is almost always carried out in the name of good, of some form of justice."
That was how Zagury explained the involvement of "an ordinary human," Salah Abdeslam, in what the doctor called "a process of totalitarian dehumanisation".
"He was driven into a radical position not through a lack of feeling for the suffering of others," Dr Zagury continued. "On the contrary, it was his sensitivity to the suffering of muslims, notably in Syria, that forced him into an extreme commitment.
"He lost his bearings, his individuality; he forgot his questions and doubts. He became part of a totalitarian system that did his thinking for him.
"The suffering of the victims of his actions becomes the inevitable result of the combat against an enemy."
Salah Abdeslam's contradictory postures in the course of this trial ... the soldier of Allah transformed into the weeping repentant ... are the reflexion of an internal dilemma.
If Abdeslam rejects the totalitarian system in which he embarked, the doctor suggested, he risks severe depression in the wake of the collapse of his self-image.
The trial continues.
