Mohamed Abrini, “the man in the hat” who accompanied the jihadists who died in suicide bombers at Brussels airport on March 22, 2016, was sentenced Friday evening to 30 years in prison for his participation in these attacks.
Concerning Salah Abdeslam, one of his co-defendants, the Assize Court referred to a previous Belgian conviction handed down in 2018 (20 years for a shooting with police officers in March 2016) and did not want to impose an additional sentence. The French jihadist remains considered by Belgian justice as one of the co-perpetrators of the Brussels attacks (35 dead). In this trial, the court found him guilty at the end of July of “assassinations in a terrorist context” like five of his co-defendants.
The court ruled that Abdeslam’s participation in the preparation of the attacks was part of an offense related to the shooting that occurred on rue du Dries in Brussels on March 15, 2016, when he fled a police search in one of the hideouts of the jihadist cell. This is the “continuous manifestation of the same criminal intention”, justified the judges in their motivations.
Among the eight men in total found guilty at the end of July of participation or complicity in the attacks of March 22 (35 deaths), three received life sentences: Osama Atar (tried in absentia because he was presumed dead in Syria), Osama Krayem and Bilal El Makhoukhi.
The Tunisian Sofien Ayari, already convicted like Abdeslam for the shooting in Rue du Dries, benefited from the same legal reasoning as the latter: no additional sentence. Finally, the Belgian-Moroccan Ali El Haddad Asufi and the Belgian-Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa were sentenced to 20 years and 10 years of imprisonment respectively. No forfeiture of Belgian nationality was pronounced as the prosecution had desired for five men including Abrini.