A qualifier that opens the way to heavy requisitions. On Thursday June 1, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office demanded that Salah Abdeslam – already sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment in France – be sentenced as a “co-perpetrator” of the March 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels. These attacks had caused the death of 32 people, just four months after the attacks of November 13, 2015, in Paris.
“No need to know the details, the date and the precise target, to be a co-perpetrator of a terrorist attack,” said federal prosecutor Paule Somers, recalling that the Frenchman had been arrested four days before the attacks of March 22, 2016. “He knowingly assisted the cell” which was behind the attacks, according to the magistrate.
Already sentenced in Paris in 2022 to irreducible life for the attacks of November 13 (130 dead), Salah Abdeslam, aged 33, faces another life prison sentence in Belgium for the facts of March 22, 2016. He denies his involvement. On the third day of the indictment, Paule Somers spoke at length about her “clandestine” stay with members of the jihadist cell entrenched in Brussels after the Parisian attacks.
This stay demonstrates, according to the magistrate, that he was associated with all the preparations with a view to hitting European soil again. And allows him to be included in the criminal sequence of March 22 even if he is in prison that day, arrested four days earlier in Molenbeek.
In the “second terrorist cell” deployed by the Islamic State group (considering that “a first” made up of nine jihadists did not survive the November 2015 operations in France), Salah Abdeslam is a combatant in his own right who has the group’s “confidence” to participate in further attacks, the Belgian prosecutor also said. He left a letter found by investigators in which he wrote that he wanted to “finish the job with his brothers”, she noted.
In Brussels from the end of 2015, “the whole group lives in a vacuum, collects weapons, considers targets and [Salah] Abdeslam is not at all sidelined”, hammered Paule Somers.