2023-09-04 15:22:24
Salah Abdeslam asked Belgian justice on Monday to allow him not to return to detention in France, in a procedure that briefly short-circuited the home stretch of the trial of the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels.
The only surviving member of the commandos who attacked Paris on November 13, 2015 (130 dead), Salah Abdeslam was sentenced to life imprisonment, the heaviest sentence in the French criminal code. In the trial of the attacks of March 22, 2016 in Brussels (35 dead), he faces a new life prison sentence.
“My future is in Belgium (…) to send me to France is to send me to death”, pleaded the 33-year-old jihadist, who has French nationality but who was born in Belgium and lived there. all his family ties.
This procedure suspended for an followingnoon the trial of the Brussels attacks, which had resumed the same morning with the first requisitions from the prosecution on the sentences.
Salah Abdeslam has carried out most of his detention in France since his arrest in March 2016. In July 2022, a few weeks following the end of the river trial for November 13, he was “temporarily handed over” to the Belgian authorities, this time to conduct the trial of the Brussels attacks, perpetrated by the same jihadist cell.
According to a French judicial source, the bilateral agreement concluded for this surrender provides for a return to France “no later than September 30, 2023”.
But Abdeslam refuses this perspective.
For more than two hours on Monday followingnoon, five lawyers took turns before the interim relief judge to castigate both his conditions of imprisonment in France and the absence of any prospect of reintegration due to the incompressible life sentence imposed. for November 13.
“A penalty of elimination! “, protested Me Olivia Ronen, taking up arguments already developed at the Paris trial.
For his part, the lawyer for the Belgian State, Bernard Renson, denounced a procedure having “no reason to exist”.
Last year Abdeslam did not object to the temporary nature of his surrender to Belgium. And in 2016, following his arrest in Brussels, he had consented to his extradition to France as part of the Paris investigation, also recalled Me Renson.
For the lawyer, this dispute on the place of execution of the French sentence must be decided in France and not in Belgium.
After the pleadings, the judge in chambers indicated that she would render her decision within the legal deadline of one month, “probably well before”.
At the trial of the Brussels attacks, Abdeslam faces with five other defendants – including his childhood friend Mohamed Abrini – a sentence of life imprisonment. It must be fixed on Tuesday on the intentions of the prosecution.
Read also Trial of the Brussels attacks: the debates on the sentences will resume on September 4
Unconventional trial
At the end of July, the Assize Court ruled that these six men were co-perpetrators of the suicide attacks at Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro, condemning them for “murders in a terrorist context”, the most serious offense.
Of the ten defendants in total, two were acquitted. Two others were found guilty of “participation in the activities of a terrorist group”, facing a maximum of ten years in prison.
Against one of them, the Tunisian Sofien Ayari, already sentenced in Paris for November 13 and in Brussels for a shooting with the police on March 15, 2016, no sentence was claimed on Monday.
In this extraordinary trial, which began in December 2022, Salah Abdeslam said he wanted to “go to Syria” to continue the jihad following the Paris attacks.
But the popular jury was not convinced by his defense.
He considered that Abdeslam had brought “indispensable help” to the attacks of March 22, claimed like those of Paris by the Islamic State organization.
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