The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office on Tuesday demanded a new life sentence for French jihadist Salah Abdeslam and Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini for their participation in the March 2016 attacks in Brussels which left 35 dead. among the main defendants of the river trial which ended in June 2022 in Paris for the attacks of November 13, 2015 (130 dead), organized by the same jihadist cell.
The first was sentenced to incompressible life on June 29, 2022 in Paris, and the second to life with a 22-year security sentence. After having “terrorized France”, Salah Abdeslam “decided to continue his war, wishing to kill innocent and unknown victims”, lambasted the Brussels trial on Tuesday morning the federal prosecutor Paule Somers. “He has not changed, he is still so radicalized, so no, he doesn’t deserve any extenuating circumstances,” she added. Abdeslam remained impassive in the box.
Then speaking about Mohamed Abrini, the other prosecutor, Bernard Michel, described the latter as “a pillar of the cell” and judged that life imprisonment was “the only sentence proportionate to his actions”. Abrini, who had accompanied the “convoy of death” to Paris on the eve of November 13, is “the man in the hat” filmed by video surveillance at Brussels-Zaventem airport on March 22, 2016 with the two assailants .
Unlike Abdeslam, Abrini, one of his childhood friends from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, never contested his participation in the Brussels attacks. The prosecution also demanded on Tuesday that he be stripped of his Belgian nationality because “he betrayed the country”. On the morning of March 22, 2016, two men blew themselves up in the departures hall of Zaventem airport and a third, an hour later, in a metro train at Maelbeek station. Result: 32 dead and hundreds injured.
But the Assize Court which judges the perpetrators of these suicide attacks counted 35 dead, estimating that 3 deaths that occurred later had a direct link with the explosions. Abdeslam, who turns 34 on September 15, denies his involvement, saying he was in prison on the day of the incident. He was arrested on March 18, 2016 in Molenbeek. But, in its judgment delivered on July 25, the Brussels Assize Court swept away its line of defense.
The popular jury found that Abdeslam had provided “indispensable assistance” to these attacks, claimed, like those in Paris, by the jihadist organization Islamic State. The French jihadist “never dissociated himself” from the group retreated to Brussels after November 13 and, as some writings testify, “chose to stay in Europe to ‘finish the job’, according to the reasons for the arrest.
Suspended this summer for six weeks, this extraordinary trial, which began in December 2022, entered its home stretch on Monday with the requisitions on the sentences. Among the ten defendants, there were two acquittals. And six of the eight culprits are considered co-perpetrators of the March 22 attacks, facing life imprisonment.
The prosecution demanded this maximum sentence in four cases: for Abdeslam, Abrini, as well as Osama Atar (tried by default because presumed dead in Syria) and the Swede Osama Krayem, who had accompanied the suicide bomber from the metro before turning back. For these four men, the life prison sentence must, in the eyes of the prosecution, be accompanied by “a provision of the sentence enforcement court for fifteen years”, a legal device which further removes the prospect of a Conditional liberation.
Two other defendants were convicted on July 25 of “participation in the activities of a terrorist group”, facing a maximum of ten years in prison. The verdict is expected in mid-September.