Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini, already sentenced to life imprisonment in 2022 in Paris for the attacks of November 13, 2015, were found guilty of “murders in a terrorist context” on Tuesday in Brussels at the trial on the jihadist attacks in 2016 in the Belgian capital.
This is the most serious offense retained before the Brussels Assize Court to judge these suicide attacks (32 dead on March 22, 2016). Both face a life sentence.
Unlike the Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini, “the man in the hat” who accompanied the two assailants from Brussels-Zaventem airport, the Frenchman Salah Abdeslam disputed his participation in the facts.
Arrested on March 18, 2016 in the Brussels municipality of Molenbeek, he was in prison on the day of the attacks.
In this extraordinary trial opened in December 2022 in the Belgian capital, a total of nine men appeared, including Abdeslam and Abrini. A tenth defendant was tried in his absence because he is presumed dead in Syria.
In its indictment in the spring, the federal prosecutor’s office had wanted the conviction for “murders in a terrorist context” of eight of the ten defendants, considered to be the “co-authors” of the facts.
It was followed by the popular jury in only six cases.
Thus the Tunisian Sofien Ayari, accomplice in Abdeslam’s end of the run, arrested like him on March 18, and the Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa, accused of having hosted Abrini in Brussels in particular, escaped the most serious offence.
MM. Ayari and Bayingana Muhirwa are, however, found guilty of participating in the activities of a terrorist group.
The last two defendants, the Smail brothers and Ibrahim Farisi, who appeared free, were acquitted.
On the morning of March 22, 2016, two men blew themselves up at Brussels-Zaventem international airport, and a third one hour later in a metro in the heart of the European district.
In addition to the 32 dead, the indictment identified some 700 injured or traumatized. There are about a thousand civil parties.
As required by Belgian law, the sentences for the accused convicted will only be pronounced in a second phase, after a new phase of requisitions and defense pleadings. This step will only take place at the beginning of September, after the judicial holidays.