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

French journalist Nicolas Henin speaks to the press as he arrives on the first day of the trial at a Paris court on February 17, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AFP

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”.

Mr. Henin said he was beaten while restrained.

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

Mr. 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.

Governments have said hundreds of Westerners joined extremist groups in Syria. French prosecutors said IS held 25 Western journalists and aid workers hostage in Syria, publicly executing several of them.