The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office on Tuesday demanded in Brussels a new life prison sentence against Frenchman Salah Abdeslam and Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini for their participation in the March 2016 attacks in the Belgian capital which left 35 dead.
With one exception, the prosecution has demanded the maximum sentence for the defendants convicted at the end of July in this assize trial, including six life sentences for “murders in a terrorist context”.
Among them, Abdeslam and Abrini were already 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 largely from Belgium 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 “terrorizing France”, Salah Abdeslam “decided to continue his war, wishing to kill innocent and unknown victims”, lambasted federal prosecutor Paule Somers at the Brussels trial on Tuesday.
“He has not changed, he is still just as radicalized, (…) he does not 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 proportional 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 the video surveillance of Brussels-Zaventem airport on March 22, 2016 in the company of two assailants.
Unlike Abdeslam, Abrini, one of his childhood friends from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, never contested his participation in the attacks. The prosecution also asked Tuesday that he be stripped of his Belgian nationality because “he betrayed the country”.
A total of five forfeitures of Belgian nationality have been claimed: for Abrini and three other Belgian-Moroccans, as well as for the Belgian-Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa, who faces ten years in prison for “participation in the activities of a terrorist group”.
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 counted 35 dead, estimating that three deaths that occurred later had a direct link with the explosions.
Abdeslam, who will be 34 on September 15, denies his participation, arguing that he was in prison on the day of the events. 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 considered that Abdeslam had provided “indispensable assistance” to these attacks, claimed, like those in Paris, by the jihadist organization Islamic State.
He “never dissociated himself” from the group which retreated to Brussels after November 13 and, in a letter found by the investigators, he referred to his defective explosive belt in Paris, asking to be “better equipped” the next times, also noted Ms. Somers.
Suspended this summer for six weeks, this extraordinary trial started in December 2022 before a thousand civil parties resumed on Monday to approach its home stretch.
After the requisitions, the defense pleadings on the sentences should begin on Thursday. The verdict is expected in mid-September.
Among ten defendants in total, there are two acquittals at the end of July.
And among the eight men found guilty, only Sofien Ayari is not targeted by a request for a maximum sentence. Against this 30-year-old Tunisian jihadist, already convicted on November 13, 2015 in Paris (30 years) and in Brussels for a shooting with the police on March 15, 2016 (20 years), the prosecution did not ask for any penalty.
In six cases, including those of Abdeslam, Abrini and Oussama Atar (tried by default because presumed dead in Syria) the prosecution wanted life imprisonment to be accompanied by “a release to the court for the application of sentences for 15 years “, a legal device that further removes the prospect of conditional release.
05/09/2023 15:18:46 – Bruxelles (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
