Salah Abdeslam, the only member still alive of the French attacks of November 13, 2015, was formally indicted in Belgium in the file of the attacks of March 22, 2016 in Brussels, one learned Monday with the federal floor. The 29-year-old has been charged with "participating in the activities of a terrorist group," said the Belgian federal prosecutor, confirming information circulating in the Belgian press for a few days.
Twelve others indicted
The suicide bombings, claimed by the group Islamic State (EI), had left 32 dead and more than 340 wounded at the international airport of Brussels-Zaventem and in a metro station of 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 Paris that had killed 130 people. Before this announcement, twelve people had already been indicted in the case of March 22 in Brussels, which also has some 800 civil parties.
The trial of the jihadist attacks in Brussels will open next year and will be held on the former NATO site in the Belgian capital. 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.
Sentenced to 20 years in prison
The trial of the Paris bombings 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, imprisoned in France, was sentenced in April 2018, in his absence, to 20 years in prison in Brussels for terrorist assassination attempts, because of his participation in a police shootings occurred in Brussels on 15 March 2016, three days before his arrest in Molenbeek. Salah Abdeslam had deposed the three suicide bombers of the Stade de France the night of the attacks before giving up an explosive belt, suggesting that he too should lead a suicide attack.