Belgian federal prosecutors on Tuesday requested a new life sentence against Frenchman Salah Abdeslam and Belgian-Moroccan Mohamed Abrini for their involvement in the March 2016 Brussels attacks that killed 35 people.
Both were also among the main defendants in the trial ending in Paris in June 2022 for the attacks on November 13, 2015 (130 dead) organized by the same jihadist cell.
The first received an irreducible life sentence in Paris on June 29, 2022, the second a life sentence with a security sentence of 22 years.
After Salah Abdeslam “terrorized France,” he “decided to continue his war and kill innocent and unknown victims,” criticized federal prosecutor Paule Somers on Tuesday morning in the Brussels trial.
“He hasn’t changed, he’s still just as radicalized, so no, he doesn’t deserve any extenuating circumstances,” she added. Abdeslam remained unmoved in the penalty area.
Then, speaking about Mohamed Abrini, the other prosecutor, Bernard Michel, described him as “a pillar of the cell” and ruled that life imprisonment was “the only punishment appropriate to his actions”.
Abrini, who accompanied the “death convoy” to Paris on the eve of November 13th, is the “man in the hat” who was filmed on video surveillance at Brussels-Zaventem airport on March 22nd 2016 in the company of two attackers.
Unlike Abdeslam, Abrini, one of his childhood friends from the Molenbeek district of Brussels, has never denied his involvement in the Brussels attacks. Prosecutors also requested on Tuesday that he be stripped of his Belgian citizenship because he had “betrayed the country.”
On the morning of March 22, 2016, two men blew themselves up in the departure hall of Zaventem airport and a third an hour later on a subway train at Maelbeek station.
- Listen to the legal part with Félix Séguin above
QUB radio
:
Results: 32 dead and hundreds injured.
But the jury that tried the perpetrators of these suicide bombings counted 35 deaths and estimated that three deaths that occurred later were directly related to the explosions.
Abdeslam, who turns 34 on September 15, denies his involvement, saying he was in prison on the day of the incident. He was arrested on March 18, 2016 in Molenbeek.
But in its July 25 verdict, the Brussels jury brushed aside its line of defense.
“An essential help”
The popular jury estimated that Abdeslam provided “indispensable assistance” in these attacks, which, like those in Paris, were claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State.
The French jihadist “never distanced himself” from the group that withdrew to Brussels after November 13 and, as certain writings attest, chose to “stay in Europe to ‘finish the work,’” it says the reasons for the judgment.
This extraordinary process, which began in December 2022 and was suspended for six weeks this summer, entered the home stretch on Monday with the submissions on the verdicts.
There were two acquittals among the ten defendants. And six of the eight perpetrators are considered accomplices in the March 22 attacks and face life imprisonment.
The prosecution demanded this maximum sentence in four cases: for Abdeslam, Abrini, as well as Osama Atar (who was tried in absentia because he is presumed dead in Syria) and the Swede Osama Krayem, who accompanied the suicide bomber from the subway before turning back .
For these four men, the life sentence must, according to the prosecution, be accompanied by a “warrant to the sentencing court for 15 years,” a legal instrument that further eliminates the prospect of conditional release.
Two other defendants were found guilty on July 25 of “participation in the activities of a terrorist group” and given a maximum prison sentence of ten years.
The verdict is expected in mid-September.