French journalist recounts IS torture and mock execution in Paris trial

French journalist Nicolas Henin in a Paris court quietly recounted repeated torture and a mock execution while the Islamic State group held him captive in war-torn Syria.

“The whole time, I was in a torture factory,” he told the court on Monday, also alluding to the brutalising of Syrian detainees and executions of fellow Western hostages.

Henin spoke at the trial of Mehdi Nemmouche, a 39-year-old convicted French jihadist, and four others charged with holding him and three other French journalists hostage for IS in Syria from June 2013 to April 2014.

Captured twice

The reporter told the court that masked jihadists abducted him in June 2013 while he was on his way to buy crisps and a bottle of water in the northern city of Raqa.

He managed to escape from the first place he was held, by detaching the bars of his cell window.

“I slipped outside and I was free,” he said.

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He ran for three hours until he came to a village where he approached two men in singlets and boxer shorts. But “these two men were jihadists,” he said, and they turned him back in.

Henin believes that Nemmouche was the man who called himself Abu Omar during his captivity.

He was “the jailer I most saw with his face uncovered”, he told the court.

Mock execution

Nemmouche is already serving life in jail for a deadly attack in Brussels in May 2014 after returning from Syria.

He has claimed he was “never the jailer of the Western hostages”.

In court, Henin described being repeatedly “interrogated” by the jihadists.

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He said he was beaten while in handcuffs or otherwise restrained.

“They beat the soles of my feet, dozens and dozens of times,” the journalist said.

He paused to drink water.

Another form of torture to which he was subjected, he said, sought to simulate “a crucifixion” outside under the burning sun.

“I remember my tongue was like stone,” he said.

Governments have said hundreds of Westerners joined extremist groups in Syria.

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French prosecutors said IS held 25 Western journalists and aid workers hostage in Syria, publicly executing several of them.

Henin said that when his captors staged a mock execution, he told them to “go on, get on with it”, and they appeared disappointed.

It was the only time he thought about taking his own life, he added.

But he said he told himself: “I am not allowed to make my children orphans, I will not commit suicide.”

The French trial of Nemmouche and another Frenchman called Abdelmalek Tanem, 35, as well as a Syrian defendant and two others in absentia because they are presumed dead, is to continue until March 21.

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