Belgian courts indict Salah Abdeslam for "participation" in Brussels attacks

Salah Abdeslam, only member still alive of the commando of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis, was formally indicted in Belgium in the file of the attacks of March 22, 2016 in Brussels, indicated Monday, August 12 the federal floor.

The 29-year-old French has been charged with "participation in the activities of a terrorist group," said the prosecutor, confirming information circulating in the Belgian press for a few days.

Before this announcement, 12 people had already been indicted in the case of March 22 in Brussels, which also has some 800 civil parties.

Trial in 2020

The suicide bombings, claimed by the Islamic State Organization (OEI), had left 32 dead and more than 340 injured at Brussels-Zaventem International Airport and at a metro station in the European capital.

They had been sponsored from Syria and organized by a Franco-Belgian cell, also behind the attacks of 13 November 2015 in France, which had left 130 dead.

The trial of the terrorist attacks in Brussels will open in 2020 in the Belgian capital on a former NATO site. It should last six to eight months. Mohamed Abrini and Osama Krayem, arrested in April 2016, are among the main suspects of these attacks.

The first admitted to being "the man in the hat" pushing a suitcase stuffed with explosives on a cart alongside the two kamikazes of the airport. He then abandoned her and fled.

Already sentenced to 20 years in prison

The trial of the Paris attacks must be held in 2021, at the earliest. A total of fourteen people, including eleven remand prisoners, are indicted in this sprawling investigation.

A small radicalized offender in the Brussels municipality of Molenbeek, Salah Abdeslam, incarcerated in France, is the only surviving member of the terrorist commandos of the 13 November attacks.

In April 2018, he was sentenced in his absence to 20 years in prison in Brussels for terrorist assassination attempts, because of his participation in a shootings against police officers in Brussels on 15 March 2016, three days before his arrest. arrest in Molenbeek.

With AFP