Brussels (AFP)
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.
Salah Abdeslam, 29, has been charged with "participation in the activities of a terrorist group," said the Belgian federal prosecutor, confirming information circulating in the Belgian press for a few days.
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 commissioned from Syria and organized by a Franco-Belgian cell also at the origin of the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris (130 dead).
Before this announcement, 12 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 6 to 8 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.
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, incarcerated in France, is the only living member of the jihadist 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 shootout against police officers in Brussels on March 15, 2016, three days before his arrest. 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.
© 2019 AFP