2023-05-08 18:47:00
This is not the reading of the Crown. Federal prosecutors want to convict Salah Abdeslam for the Brussels attacks. For them, it is the whole of the terrorist cell which prepares the attacks. And so it doesn’t matter that Salah Abdeslam was arrested on March 18, 2016.
Salah Abdeslam escaped capture on March 15, 2016. When the police arrived at the hideout on rue du Dries in Forest, he fled with another of the accused Sofien Ayari, while the third man hidden in the hideout will do the shot with the police, before being shot.
Salah Abdeslam and Sofien Ayari did not know the location of the other two hideouts. Hunted by the police, with no obvious place to fall back, Salah Abdeslam returned to Molenbeek.
Resumption of the trial of the attacks in Brussels: continuation of the testimonies on the preparations and the supply of weapons
On March 15, 2016, at 9 p.m., Salah Abdeslam rang the doorbell of his cousin, Abid Aberkane, who was absent. The police, who have set up an observation, spot him but do not arrest him. Through the intercom, Abdeslam introduces himself to Ms. Aberkane as a work colleague and asks for her husband’s phone number. He gets it. The cell phone of the latter, also a childhood friend of Mohamed Abrini, was tapped because he was known to be radicalized.
Contacted, Abid Aberkane, who was then returning from his work at Bruxelles-Propreté, agreed to shelter the two fugitives in the cellar of his mother’s house, without her knowledge. “He asked me to help him. I did it in a family context, not a terrorist one,” explained Abid Aberkane before the Assize Court on Monday. And to insist: “I acted emotionally not rationally”.
He recognizes it. He knew that Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini were wanted. He had also learned from the media that two terrorists had escaped from the hideout in rue du Dries. “I felt a bit stuck. I had a hard time saying no,” says Abid Aberkane of his cousin’s request.
I felt a bit stuck. I had a hard time saying no.
Abid Aberkane justifies himself. He asked his cousin to turn to Abrini for a place to stay. But Salah Abdeslam would have replied that they have not seen each other since the attacks of November 13 in Paris, he explained before the Assize Court. Which was, on Abdeslam’s part, a lie. The two men had hid simultaneously in the same hideouts.
A temporary shelter
To hear Abid Aberkane, Salah Abdeslam hoped “to find refuge while waiting for things to calm down and then go elsewhere”. Abid Aberkane will rub shoulders with Salah Abdeslam for a long time. He will supply him with food in the cellar of his mother’s house. Salah Abdeslam will ask him to get him a firearm, “a small one if the police were to surprise him”. Abid Aberkane will not.
Questioned by the public prosecutor, Abid Aberkane has “no memory” of Salah Abdeslam telling him he wanted to go to Syria. Abid Aberkane thus confirms that he thinks that if the police had not intervened in Forest, he would have stayed there.
On March 18, 2016, Salah Abdeslam was captured. Abid Aberkane is obviously arrested. He will be sentenced in 2022 to a three-year suspended prison sentence for having hosted Salah Abdeslam. During his trial, he confided: “What I did was not proof of intelligence. I’m not a thoughtful person. Sometimes I do stupid things. I was not smart on that one”.
Abid Aberkane cannot therefore support the statements of Salah Abdeslam according to which he intended to join Syria at the time of his run. The defense of Salah Abdeslam, through the voice of Me Delphine Paci, is not surprised. And to insist on the limited intellectual capacities of Abid Aberkane, which no one disputes. “He didn’t have the skill to be Salah Abdeslam’s confidant and to organize anything for him,” she said.
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