'You can't turn the clock back': Paris attacks survivors react to guilty verdicts
"A trial lasting ten months, it helps to rebuild. It's over, there's going to be a void."
Sophie, a survivor of the terror attack on the Bataclan concert venue, responded with relief and tears in her eyes after Wednesday's verdicts over the attacks of 13 November, 2015.
More than six years after the worst crime of the post-war period in France, the special criminal court in Paris sentenced Salah Abdeslam — the only surviving member of the terror group which killed 130 people — to life imprisonment, the heaviest sentence in the penal code.
The other defendants were given sentences ranging from two years to life in prison, with the possibility of parole for some and a mandatory life sentence for others.
Before verdicts were read out, the large courtroom had never been so full — with survivors and relatives of the victims squeezed together on the wooden benches, the electric atmosphere a far cry from the striking silence of the trial's first day last September.
"The sentences are quite heavy," said Sophie, moved. "They won't get out of prison immediately. We're going to enjoy it, I feel a lot of relief."
She took David Fritz, a Bataclan survivor, in her arms. "I feel I have grown up. It's important to see that justice has been done. It was necessary. It's a bit of a floating moment, like slamming a big iron door," he says.
"The way to deal with this horror was to rebuild as a group, and not individually. We needed to stick together and to hear what justice had to say to us after six and a half years," said Arthur Dénouveaux, President of the victims' association Life For Paris.
But, he added after the verdicts, this was just the first stage in a long healing process.
"I still have the impression of a huge mess, people are sent to
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