“It disrupted my life to the point of no return”, testifies a victim

It was 8 a.m. on March 22, 2016 when two explosions ripped through the hall of Zaventem airport. An hour later, at 9:11 a.m., another suicide bomber blew himself up on a metro train at Maelbeek station, in the heart of the European district. Thirty-two people are killed in these attacks organized by the same commando as the Paris attacks. Salah Abdeslam and eight other defendants will appear in the trial which opens Monday, September 12 and will last eight months.

That day, Sandrine, a special education teacher, was in the metro. She was injured and then treated in the lobby of a nearby hotel converted into a field hospital. It is in this hotel that she meets franceinfo to tell what she expects from this trial. “I arrived here, on this couch by the way“, she says with emotion. “They put sheets on the windows so we couldn’t see what was going on outside.”she continues, reminiscing “the emotion, the tears, the cries”.

At 37, Sandrine has hearing damage from the explosion. She followed with great attention the trial of the attacks of November 13 which was held in Paris, and of which several defendants have already been condemned. “There are defendants who are the same in the two files, so the story can also be understood by the French trial“, she advances.