2023-09-16 04:33:41
The verdict is in. On Friday, justice sentenced Mohamed Abrini to thirty years’ imprisonment following the trial of the Brussels attacks, which left 35 dead in March 2016. At the end of July, he, like Salah Abdeslam, was declared guilty of “d “assassinations in a terrorist context”.
On Salah Abdeslam’s side, no new sentence. The Brussels Assize Court in fact considers that the French sentence – incompressible life sentence – and the 20 years of imprisonment in the trial of the shooting in Rue du Dries “are sufficient”. The French jihadist remains considered by Belgian justice as one of the co-perpetrators of the Brussels attacks.
The federal prosecutor’s office had requested a new life prison sentence against Abdeslam, already sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment in June 2022 in Paris for his participation in the attacks of November 13, 2015, which left 130 dead. But the court accepted the arguments of the defense of the Frenchman who had pleaded not to accumulate several heavy sentences.
Three of the accused received life sentences
The court ruled that Abdeslam’s participation in the preparation of the attacks was part of an offense related to the shooting that occurred on rue du Dries in Brussels on March 15, 2016, when he fled a police search in one of the hideouts of the jihadist cell. This is the “continuous manifestation of the same criminal intention”, justified the judges in their motivations.
Among the eight men in total found guilty at the end of July of participation or complicity in the attacks of March 22 (35 deaths), three received life imprisonment: Osama Atar (tried in absentia because presumed dead in Syria), Osama Krayem and Bilal El Makhoukhi.
No forfeiture of Belgian nationality has been pronounced
The Tunisian Sofien Ayari, already convicted like Abdeslam for the shooting in Rue du Dries, benefited from the same legal reasoning as the latter: no additional sentence. Finally, the Belgian-Moroccan Ali El Haddad Asufi and the Belgian-Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa were sentenced to 20 years and 10 years of imprisonment respectively.
No forfeiture of Belgian nationality was pronounced as the prosecution had desired for five men including Abrini.
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