He is the only jihadist still alive after the attacks of November 13, 2015. On Tuesday April 11, the Brussels Assize Court said that Salah Abdeslam wanted to “go to Syria” after the attacks in Paris, which killed 130 dead. Already sentenced in France to incompressible life imprisonment [the heaviest possible sentence, editor’s note], he is now on trial in Belgium with eight co-defendants for the attacks that killed 32 people on March 22, 2016 in Brussels.
Asked by Laurence Massart, the president of the court, about a document in which he said he wanted to “finish the job” after the attacks of November 13, he defended himself by assuring that it was “only words”. “Between words and action, there is a margin,” he continued, denying any involvement in these attacks organized by the same cell of the Islamic State group as those in France.
He claimed to have written this text “a month or a month and a half” after the Paris attacks to “give assurances” to his leaders who had doubts when he explained to them that he had survived because his explosive belt had proven ” defective”. He did not name them, merely saying that they were “no longer of this world”.
While hidden in Brussels, where he had been able to flee, he had expressed his desire to “go to Syria”. “I was asked if I was ready to do an operation on my own if they gave me a Kalashnikov, for example. Me, I was categorical, I said that I would not do it. That’s when I was told: ‘We’ll find a way for you to go to Syria, you have nothing to do here,’” he said.
Arrested in Brussels on March 18, 2016, four days before the double Islamist attack at Zaventem airport and in the metro, Salah Abdeslam denies having knowledge of these attack plans. “I was sentenced to life, whether you sentence me or not makes absolutely no difference to me. If I’m defending myself today, it’s on principle,” he told the court.
For the prosecution, the Frenchman was certainly incarcerated on March 22, but he could not ignore that other attacks were being prepared after having shared for months the daily life of members of the jihadist cell in the Belgian capital.