Grief suddenly entered the courtroom – poignant, palpable, reined in by 35 years of suffering but still there – and anger, too, along with calm and infinite dignity. The victims' families, who had lost fathers, brothers or husbands in UTA flight 772, calmly expressed their impossible grief in the Paris court, on Thursday, January 23. The terrorist attack claimed the lives of 170 people of 18 nationalities, including 54 French citizens, in 1989. A 1999 trial in France convicted six Libyans in absentia.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the other defendants in the trial on allegations that Libyan money financed Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign listened wordlessly, pale, pallid, to this stream of sacrificed lives.

The Klein family spoke first. "My brother Jean-Pierre died on September 19, 1989," Danièle said softly. "He was an actor, a director, a theater buff, admitted to the Conservatoire National at 18, without even [having graduated from high school]. When he left a room, the lights went down a notch." Filmmaker François Truffaut had noticed the young man, and gave him a role in The Last Metro (1980). He had spent two months in the Republic of the Congo, putting on a play about a mad dictator who was devouring his people. "The premiere of the play, without him, was bathed in tears." The Kleins are a non-religious Jewish family, Holocaust survivors and proud of being related to Léon Blum, a 1930s prime minister.

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