A preliminary hearing is convened on Monday September 12 to settle various points of procedure of the trial of the attacks of March 22, 2016.
Six and a half years after the events, the Assize Court of Brussels begins Monday, September 12 a trial that looks like a judicial marathon to try the ten alleged co-authors of the jihadist attacks which killed 32 people in 2016 in the Belgian capital.
The debates should not open until October. But a preliminary hearing is convened Monday at 9 a.m. to settle various points of procedure, and in particular to fix the order of appearance of the witnesses who will succeed one another at the bar, a priori until June 2023.
The hearing should also give rise to a lively debate on the closed individual boxes set up in the courtroom for the accused and compared to “cagesby their lawyers. Several of them said they wanted to get their “demolition“. “I don’t ask him for a chair, I just don’t want to be treated like an animal“said Michel Bouchat, lawyer for Salah Abdeslam.
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The French jihadist, the only member still alive of the commandos of November 13, 2015, which killed 130 people in Paris and Saint-Denis, is one of the ten accused in the trial. He will be absent for this first day.
An attack linked to November 13
On the morning of March 22, 2016, two jihadists blew themselves up at Brussels-Zaventem international airport, and a third a good hour later in the metro of the European capital. Result: 32 dead and more than 340 injured.
At this stage, the federal prosecutor’s office has identified 960 civil parties, injured or relatives of victims claiming compensation for damage, in the largest trial ever organized in Belgium before a popular jury.
The investigation quickly revealed, in particular thanks to a computer found in a trash can, that the perpetrators of the March 22 attacks were linked to those of November 13, members of the same cell of the Islamic State formed largely on Belgian soil. It was probably the arrest of Salah Abdeslam on March 18 in Brussels that precipitated the action of the other members of the cell.
In addition to Salah Abdeslam, sentenced to irreducible life imprisonment in France, this new judicial appointment concerns the alleged leader of this cell, Oussama Atar, already tried in absentia for November 13 (he is presumed dead in Syria), as well as four other convicts in the river trial which ended at the end of June in Paris.
This is Mohamed Abrini, “the man in the hatwho had abandoned his trolley of explosives at Zaventem airport before fleeing, from the Swede Osama Krayem, who had turned back in the metro. Also on trial are the Tunisian Sofien Ayari, an accomplice in the last days of Salah Abdeslam’s flight, and the Belgian-Moroccan Ali El Haddad Asufi, a close friend of the El Bakraoui brothers, two of the three “suicide bombersdied on March 22.
Four other defendants were not implicated for November 13. Suspected of having helped materially or harbored the suicide bombers in Brussels knowing their intentions, they are considered to be co-authors of the attacks. All must answer for “assassinations in a terrorist context” and incur life imprisonment.
“Scenes of War”
Facing them, the victims, many of whom are supported by two associations created after the attacks, V-Europe and Life4Brussels, see the trial as a key step in their reconstruction. “We hope that our suffering will be recognized» and that this marks «the start of something else“, confided to AFP Philippe Vandenberghe, a volunteer rescuer intervened at the airport and suffering from post-traumatic stress.
Many witnesses spoke oftotal chaos», «war scenes», to describe the situation in Zaventem and the Maelbeek metro just after the explosions which killed sixteen people in each of the two places.
The trial is being held at the former Brussels headquarters of NATO, made available to Belgian justice. The main courtroom can only accommodate 170 people, seven other rooms called “relay» have been set up for the civil parties, with video transmission of the proceedings and the possibility of intervening remotely.