Salah Abdeslam, guilty of murder for the attacks in Brussels

Belgium has closed a page of its history today. The jury finds six of the defendants guilty of terrorist murder on March 22, 2016. Among them is Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the Paris attacks and already sentenced in France.

The defendants are considered guilty of terrorist murder for having participated in the attacks in which 32 people died and 340 were injured. Nine of them sat on the bench. Three of whom have been acquitted of murder, but have been acquitted of participating in a terrorist organization.

Only Ossama Atar, considered the leader of the terrorist cell and who organized the attacks, is the only court in absentia, and who is believed to have died in Syria, as reported in 2019 by the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

After today’s verdict, new hearings and deliberations will be held in September to decide the sentences that each of the defendants must serve.

Salah Abdeslam, the only living terrorist of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, participated in the process and who was already sentenced a year ago in France to life imprisonment without the possibility of remission. Abdeslam was supposed to activate his explosive belt in front of the Stade de France, but at the last moment he backed out of him. He escaped after these attacks to Brussels, where he was hidden in various places in the city.

Finally, after several attempts by the Belgian police to find his whereabouts, he was found in his neighborhood, Molenbeek, a short distance from where his family lived on March 18, 2016. His arrest accelerated plans to attack again on European soil, which is why the terrorist cell decided to attack Brussels four days later. As the defendants explained during the interrogations, attacking the Belgian capital was not in the initial plans.

Abdeslam refused to apologize to the victims, although he did say he was “moved by the lack of understanding” that the witnesses felt. However, he argued that he would not ask for forgiveness because it would be “acknowledging” his guilt. “As I have already said, those in Brussels are not my victims,” ??he asserted, shielded by the fact that he was arrested days before the events took place.

For his part, Mohamed Abrini, known as “the man with the hat” because, according to security cameras, he was wearing one when he arrived at the airport, he repented and did not set off any bombs, he apologized before the deliberations of the jury. “The only thing I can say is that I apologize to the victims and their relatives.”

This puts an end to a macro process of more than seven months, 489 files and almost a thousand civil parties with moments of tension and controversy. The trial, which was held at the former NATO headquarters, started almost two months late. It should have started at the beginning of October, but it didn’t start until December 5th. The reason was due to the composition of the glass cells in which the defendants had to be, which were separated from each other. According to defense lawyers, the individual cells contravened the European Convention on Human Rights; Finally, a new glass cabin had to be built without separation, in which the defendants could be together and thus have more contact with their lawyers.

The process was also slowed down by the degrading and humiliating treatment that the defendants received during the transfers from prison to the trials, according to their defense and later confirmed by the court. In a ruling by the Court of Cassation, which upheld a previous ruling, the police were urged to stop searching six of the defendants in which they were forced to lie naked and on their knees to check that they were not hiding any objects inside their bodies that would jeopardize the security of the trial.

Belgium has closed one of the most painful chapters in its recent history. The attacks in Brussels were the worst attack suffered in the country since World War II. Dozens of victims and residents of the capital will never forget the impact it had on a country that until then had no regard for terrorism, which had to change its penal code after the Paris attacks and lacked any anti-terrorist law until the 9/11 attacks.