French journalist recounts IS torture, mock execution as a captive in Syria

French journalist recounts torture and mock execution by IS captors in Syria, testifying at trial of jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche.

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

“The whole time, I was in a torture factory,” he told the court on Monday (February 24, 2025), also alluding to the brutalising of Syrian detainees and executions of fellow Western hostages.

Mr. 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.

The pressperson told the court that masked jihadists abducted him in June 2013 while he was on his way to a store 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. 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. He 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.

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”.