Brahim Abdeslam
Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up outside a café on the Boulevard Voltaire and killed nobody but himself. He was born in Brussels to a Moroccan family and grew up in Molenbeek, the district that supplied several of the men involved in the attacks of 2015 and became shorthand for a failure of integration that was more specific than the shorthand allowed. He ran a bar called Les Béguines with his brother Salah, which was closed by the commune weeks before the attacks for the sale of cannabis. Neighbours and his own family described him as a heavy user of drugs and alcohol with no observable religious practice until very shortly before. On the night of 13 November 2015 he detonated a vest at the Comptoir Voltaire at about half past nine, wounding one person seriously. The same evening killed 130 people at the Bataclan, the Stade de France and the terrace cafés of the 10th and 11th arrondissements, the deadliest attack in France since the war. His brother Salah abandoned his own vest, fled to Brussels, was taken after four months in hiding and is serving life. Their brother Mohamed, a municipal employee, condemned the attacks publicly and kept his job. The trial of 2021 and 2022 heard from more than three hundred survivors and civil parties over ten months in a courtroom built for it, and is the largest criminal proceeding in modern French history. He was not tried, having died on the night, and appears in it as a name in other people's testimony. The investigations that followed found the network had been organised from Syria and had moved through Europe using the refugee routes of 2015, which shaped the politics of the continent for years afterwards - an outcome the attackers intended and got.
- Lived: 1984 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: militant
