Two members of Fofana's defence team — Maître Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the wife of Carlos "the Jackal", the Venezuelan-born pro-jihadi serving a life sentence for multiple terror attacks, and Maître Emmanuel Ludot, who represented Saddam Hussein — were interviewed on an Agence France Press video on the opening day of the trial. Angered by hecklers shouting at defendants and lawyers outside the court, they denounced political and media pressure against their client, claiming that President Nicolas Sarkozy was using the case for ignoble electoral reasons. They also claimed that some of the plaintiffs were backed by a "certain lobby", and that blacks had been
attacked by thugs from the right-wing Zionist Betar and the Jewish Defence League groups "when the Halimi family organised a demonstration". Maître Coutant-Peyre declares in the video: "Fofana is a scapegoat." A young lawyer joins them. They discuss the case. He thinks they'll be able to get the court to drop the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They joke about Maître Szpiner. Is the Elysée (the presidency) paying his fees? The young lawyer guffaws. "It's the Crif [the umbrella body of French Jewry]!" he says, provoking derisive laughter, "and the Elysée is funding the Crif." According to leaked information, Fofana subsequently dismissed Coutant-Peyre in an outburst of paranoid anti-Semitic rage, shouting, "Peyre, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?"

In the absence of reliable information about the trial, which is scheduled to run until 11 July, how can one predict the verdict? The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Life imprisonment is a relative concept. Prisons are overcrowded and dangerous criminals are often released early. Confidential sources have told me that Fofana could be "rubbed out" in prison.

Journalists who were present at the start of the trial, until a motion brought by the Halimi family to hear the case in an open court was defeated, reported that Fofana entered shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ("Allah is Great"). Asked to identify himself, he replied in mangled French, "Arabs, African armed revolt, Salafist barbarian." He gave the day of Ilan's death as his date of birth. 

Will lawyers, if any are left to defend him, use Fofana's megalomaniac defiance as an argument for diminished responsibility? In 2003 a Muslim neighbour lured a Jewish DJ, Sebastien Selam, into the underground garage of their building, slit his throat, gouged out his eyes with a carving fork, went home and told his mother: "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise." He was released after spending a few years in a mental hospital and will apparently never be tried. The anti-Semitic motivation in that case was so thoroughly denied that commentators systematically referred to Halimi's killing as the first anti-Semitic murder in France.