Salah Abdeslam extracted from Fleury-Mérogis prison to be handed over to Belgium


Already sentenced to life imprisonment in France for the attacks of November 13, 2015, Salah Abdeslam will be tried in October for the Brussels attacks of 2016.

Salah Abdeslam was taken from Fleury-Mérogis prison (Essonne) on the morning of Wednesday July 13 to be transferred to Belgium, where he is to be tried from October for the attacks in Brussels in March 2016, learned the AFP from sources familiar with the matter.

He was taken from the remand center on Wednesday morning between 8:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. by members of the Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), then taken to an airport from where a plane will take off for Belgium, said these sources. .

A new judicial marathon

Salah Abdeslam was transferred from France and imprisoned on Wednesday in Belgium, where another trial awaits him in October, a source familiar with the matter told AFP. According to the Belgian source close to the file attached by AFP, once arrived on Belgian soil, this particularly guarded detainee was taken to Ittre prison, between Brussels and Charleroi (South), where the van transporting him is arrived around 11:30 a.m. (09:30 GMT).

He will begin a new judicial marathon from October 10, with the trial of the attacks which killed 32 people in Brussels on March 22, 2016 – organized by the same jihadist cell of the Islamic State group as the attacks of November 13. These debates could last until the summer of 2023.

Establishment under development

At the trial of the Brussels attacks, Salah Abdeslam will be tried alongside five of his co-accused from Paris, including one absent. The other four expected in the box are Mohamed Abrini, the “man in hatwho had abandoned his cart of explosives at Zaventem airport before fleeing, the Swede Osama Krayem, the Tunisian Sofien Ayari and the Belgian-Moroccan Ali El Haddad Asufi. Osama Atar, alleged sponsor of the November 13 attacks, will also be tried in Brussels by default, because he is presumed dead in Syria.

Like Abdeslam, the defendants already involved in the Paris trial must be transferred to Belgium. Mohamed Abrini arrived there on Tuesday and was imprisoned in a prison in the country, confirmed one of his lawyers, Stanislas Eskenazi. In view of the trial, Belgian justice wants to reunite the defendants in the new mega prison of Haren, near Brussels, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But the establishment, still in the process of being fitted out, has not yet been handed over to the prison administration, which is counting on a possible reception of these prisoners.normally in september“, added this source. While waiting for the Haren cells to be made available, the prisoners will be incarcerated in various Belgian prisons.

On June 29, after almost ten months of a trial “historical», Salah Abdeslam was sentenced to incompressible life imprisonment by the special assize court of Paris for his role in the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris and Saint-Denis. He became the fifth man in France sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty in the Penal Code, which makes any possibility of release minimal. He did not appeal, making his conviction final.

SEE ALSO – Attacks of November 13: an implacable verdict

Possible to serve your sentence in Belgium

The court found the 32-year-old Frenchman, the only surviving member of the jihadist commandos that left 130 dead and hundreds injured in Paris and Saint-Denis, guilty of being the “co-author“of a”single crime scene“: the Stade de France, the machine-gunned Parisian terraces and the Bataclan. His 19 co-defendants (six of them, five of whom were presumed dead, were tried in their absence) were sentenced to terms ranging from two years’ imprisonment to irreducible life imprisonment. None of them appealed either.

At the trial of the Brussels attacks, Salah Abdeslam will be judged alongside four of his co-defendants in Paris: Mohamed Abrini, the “man in hat», the Swede Osama Krayem, the Tunisian Sofien Ayari and the Belgian-Moroccan Ali El Haddad Asufi. They must also be transferred to Belgium. Mohammed Abrini arrived there on Tuesday and was imprisoned in a prison in the country, two other sources close to the case and one of his lawyers, Stanislas Eskenazi, told AFP.

Salah Abdeslam was arrested in Belgium on March 18, 2016, after several months on the run. He was definitively handed over to France under a European arrest warrant a month later. He will return to serve his sentence in France, after the Belgian trial. Once all his final convictions, it will be legally possible for him to ask to serve his sentence in Belgium, where he grew up and where all his family resides.


SEE ALSO – Verdict of the trial of the attacks of November 13: incompressible life imprisonment for Abdeslam



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