Salah Abdeslam asked the Belgian justice system on Monday to allow him not to return to detention in France. The proceedings thus briefly shortened the home straight of the trial surrounding the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels.
• Also read: Brussels attacks: Abdeslam and Abrini found guilty of murder
• Also read: Salah Abdeslam sentenced to life imprisonment
As the only surviving member of the commando that attacked Paris on November 13, 2015 (130 dead), Salah Abdeslam was sentenced to an irreducible life sentence, the highest penalty in the French penal code. In the trial surrounding the attacks on March 22, 2016 in Brussels (35 dead), he faces a new life sentence.
“My future is in Belgium (…), sending me to France means sending me to death,” argued the 33-year-old jihadist, who has French nationality but was born in Belgium and all his family has ties.
He was speaking before a judge at the Brussels Civil Court, who was presented with a request from his lawyers to “prohibit the Belgian state from transferring him to France.”
As a result of this procedure, the trial on the Brussels attacks, which had resumed the same morning with the first statements from the public prosecutor’s office on the verdicts, was suspended for an afternoon.
Salah Abdeslam has spent most of his time in prison in France since his arrest in March 2016. In July 2022, a few weeks after the end of the November 13 trial, he was “temporarily” handed over to the Belgian authorities, this time to carry out the trial on the Brussels attacks carried out by the same jihadist cell.
According to a French judicial source, the bilateral agreement concluded for this handover provides for a return to France “no later than September 30, 2023”.
But Abdeslam rejects this prospect.
For more than two hours on Monday afternoon, five lawyers took turns before the summary judge to criticize both his prison conditions in France and the lack of any prospect of reintegration due to the life sentence imposed on November 13th.
“A verdict of elimination!” protested Olivia Ronen, repeating arguments that had already been developed in the Paris trial.
For his part, the Belgian state’s lawyer, Bernard Renson, denounced a procedure that had “no right to exist”.
Last year, Abdeslam had no objection to the temporary nature of his handover to Belgium. And in 2016, after his arrest in Brussels, he agreed to be extradited to France as part of the Paris investigation, Me Renson also recalled.
For the lawyer, this dispute over the place of enforcement of the French judgment must be decided in France and not in Belgium.
After the pleadings, the emergency judge indicated that she would make her decision within the statutory deadline of one month, “probably much sooner”.
In the trial over the Brussels attacks, Abdeslam and five other defendants – including his childhood friend Mohamed Abrini – face life imprisonment. A decision on the intentions of the prosecution will be made on Tuesday.
At the end of July, the jury ruled that these six men were accomplices in the suicide attacks at Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station and convicted them of “murder in a terrorist context,” the most serious crime.
Of the ten defendants, two were acquitted. Two other people were found guilty of “participation in the activities of a terrorist group” and sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison.
No verdict was requested on Monday against one of them, the Tunisian Sofien Ayari, already convicted in Paris for November 13 and in Brussels for a shootout with police on March 15, 2016.
In this extraordinary trial, which began in December 2022, Salah Abdeslam reiterated that he wanted to “go to Syria” to continue jihad after the Paris attacks.
But the popular jury was not convinced by his defense.
He believed Abdeslam provided “indispensable assistance” in the March 22 attacks, which, like those in Paris, were claimed by the Islamic State organization.
The French jihadist “never distanced himself” from the group that withdrew to Brussels after November 13 and, as certain writings attest, chose “to remain in Europe to finish the work,” as the court said in its late judgment from July stated.