The trial of the Brussels attacks continues, as does the saga around the “strip” searches of the accused. Three of these individuals are still not in the box today. All were strip searched.
Like last week, the police justify these strip searches in Dutch only. But there is more serious since in these explanations, there are manifest errors. Last Friday, the police explained that Salah Abdeslam had two books in prison on combat techniques, in the cell. Today, she says the opposite. She corrects. She specifies that these are books on “how to stay in shape” in the cell. It is still very different.
And there is even more serious, the police indicate that one of the accused, Hervé Bayingana, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Paris Court of Appeal. However, this is false, this man was not judged in Paris. Inevitably, this provokes reactions. That of Mohamed Abrini for example who says: “You cover yourself in shame every morning”. On this, we can not give him completely wrong. And one wonders regarding the real objective of the police.
“We justify by extremely serious facts the fact that he might be searched, it is totally false. Who are we kidding? I had asked that to the jurors. Now we know that the Minister of Justice should really explain himself. For the moment, I have the impression that he does not want this trial to continue. He continues not to respect court decisions and therefore I unfortunately believe, like civil parties say, if we continue like this, we risk being broken. This means that everything we have done now might be done once more in two years. It is no longer the accused who will no longer be at the stand, it is the civil parties. We understand that for them, it is something that would be completely indecent”estimates Vincent Lurquin, l’avocat d’Hervé Bayingana.