Salah Abdeslam was taken from the cell he occupied at Haren prison, in the suburbs of Brussels, to be handed over to the French authorities on Wednesday February 7. The only survivor of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, transferred to Belgium in 2022 to appear at the trial of the attacks committed at Zaventem airport and in the Brussels metro in March 2016, hoped to serve his sentence there and refused to return France.
In order to ensure the presence of the terrorist at this trial, the Belgian authorities had sent a European arrest warrant to Paris. On July 13, 2022, the Frenchman was handed over to Belgium for the duration of this trial. Sentenced, in July 2023, to twenty years of imprisonment for his participation in these attacks which caused the death of thirty-five people, he then asked to carry out in a Belgian prison the sentence imposed on him by the Assize Court of Paris in June 2022, i.e. life imprisonment with an irreducible security period.
Seized urgently, the Brussels Court of Appeal published, on October 3, 2023, an order which was favorable to it, prohibiting “temporarily” his extradition. His lawyers argued that the irreducible life sentence imposed in Paris was inhuman and degrading treatment. They also argued that his detention in France would have deprived him of any contact with his relatives, who live in Belgium. A court of first instance was expected to rule on the merits later, probably not for several months.
“Legally irrevocable return”
According to the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, it was impossible to wait for this judgment without running the risk of the Frenchman’s possible release: the agreement between the general prosecutor of the Paris Court of Appeal and the Belgian federal prosecutor had been extended but ran until March 27 only. Beyond that, there would no longer have been a legal basis to ensure continued imprisonment. “The return of Salah Abdeslam to France at the end of the criminal proceedings was therefore legally irrevocable”, indicated the press release published Wednesday morning in Brussels.
The terrorist “has just been incarcerated in a prison in the Paris region” after his transfer, indicated the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti. “ In accordance with the decision of the French courts and the wishes of victims’ associations, he will serve his irreducible life sentence there.added the minister on the social network.
Me Delphine Paci, one of Salah Abdeslam’s lawyers, said “shocked” by the decision of the Belgian authorities. “States are organizing themselves to violate court decisions imposed on them”, she denounced. At the end of the Brussels trial, she declared that her client was “recoverable and amendable, he is not a psychopath, but an ordinary personality”. “I don’t see how a court could decide anything else [que son maintien en Belgique] »estimated Me Michel Bouchat, Salah Abdeslam’s other defender.
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