Belgium pays national tribute on Monday to the victims of the jihadist attacks of March 22, 2016, a date that is remembered five years later as that of the worst attacks suffered by the country since the Second World War.
That morning, a double suicide attack, at Brussels international airport and then in a metro station in the European district, left 32 dead and more than 340 injured, acts claimed by the Islamic State (IS) organization.
The small country of 11.5 million inhabitants is hit in the heart as was France a few months earlier.
Read also: The bitterness of the victims of the attack of July 14, 2016
Four days earlier, Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commandos who struck Paris on November 13, 2015 (130 dead), was arrested in Brussels after four months on the run.
According to investigators, his arrest probably accelerated the act of other members of this jihadist cell folded in Belgium, who felt hunted by the police.
Monday, at 7:58 am then 9:11 am, at the time when the explosions occurred at Zaventem airport and at the Maelbeek metro,
"a moment of silence and contemplation"
will be observed on site.
Due to the pandemic, it will take place in a small committee, in the presence of the King of the Belgians Philippe and Queen Mathilde, accompanied by Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and his wife.
Speeches and testimonies of the wounded or relatives of those killed are scheduled in a second time, at quarter past twelve, during a televised ceremony organized next to the European institutions, where a monument dedicated to the victims of terrorist acts has been erected. .
Read also: Since 2012, 263 people have died in Islamist attacks in France
The national tribute, which associates the associations of victims Life4Brussels and V-Europe, intervenes against a background of criticism due to the slowness of the administration and the insurance companies to take charge of the damage caused by the attacks.
“It took me almost five years to get compensation for the loss of my spouse.
My son has still not received it, ”
says Charlotte Dixon-Sutcliffe, whose husband, a British expatriate in Brussels, is one of the 16 dead at the Maelbeek metro.
For its part, Life4Brussels deplored the abandonment by the Belgian government of a project for a "guarantee fund", on the French model, which would have enabled victims to receive lump-sum aid from the State, then charged to the latter. to turn to insurers to recover the money.
In Belgium, cases are handled on a case-by-case basis,
"we let the victims address themselves to a multitude of public or private organizations"
, regrets the association,
"the State has not understood that some become discouraged and lose their rights ”
.
Read also: Attacks in Brussels: dress rehearsal before an extraordinary trial
Me Nic Reynaert, who was traveling in the train targeted by the metro suicide bomber, this month sued the state and an insurer for
"errors and negligence"
.
He suffers from neurological lesions, according to him misdiagnosed.
In his complaint, the lawyer claims to have
"never"
received information from medical experts on all the possible consequences of an explosion in a confined environment.
"The physical symptoms of PTS
(post traumatic stress disorder)
have been dismissed as purely psychological,"
he writes.
Other injured people testified to similar difficulties in having their incapacity for work recognized, which in some cases resurfaced months after the attacks.
Never in Belgium have so many lawyers been called upon for the same facts.
In the legal proceedings, under the authority of the federal prosecutor's office (competent in matters of terrorism), 720 civil parties have already been identified, which suggests the largest trial in the history of the country.
At the beginning of January, ten suspects were returned to the Assize Court for "murders committed in a terrorist context".
The order has yet to be confirmed by the court of appeal.
The trial could be held from September 2022 in Brussels.
Among the main defendants are, in addition to Salah Abdeslam, two men who accompanied the three suicide bombers who died on March 22.
They are Mohamed Abrini,
"the man in the hat"
, who gave up blowing himself up at the airport, and Osama Krayem, who turned back after entering the metro.