Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini found guilty of murder

Both face a life sentence. Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini, already sentenced to life imprisonment in Paris for the attacks of November 13, 2015, were found guilty of “murders in a terrorist context”, Tuesday July 25, at the trial of the jihadist attacks of March 22, 2016 in Brussels. This is the most serious offense retained before the Assize Court of the Belgian capital, responsible for judging these suicide attacks which left 32 dead and some 700 people injured or traumatized.

Salah Abdeslam disputed his participation in the facts. Arrested on March 18, 2016 in the Brussels municipality of Molenbeek, the Frenchman was in prison on the day of the attacks in the Belgian capital. As for the Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini, identified as “the man in the hat”, he accompanied the two assailants who blew themselves up at Brussels-Zaventem airport on the morning of March 22, 2016. An hour later, a third man had set off his explosive belt in a metro in the middle of the European district.

The sentences of the culprits known in September

In this extraordinary trial opened in December 2022 in the Belgian capital, a total of nine men appeared. A tenth defendant was tried in his absence because he is presumed dead in Syria. The Tunisian Sofien Ayari, accomplice in the end of the run of Salah Abdeslam, arrested like him on March 18, and the Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa, accused of having hosted Mohamed Abrini in Brussels in particular, are however declared guilty of participation in the activities of a terrorist group.

The last two defendants, the Smail brothers and Ibrahim Farisi, who appeared free, were acquitted.

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.