The trial of fourteen alleged accomplices of jihadist commandos who attacked Paris on November 13, 2015 will be held before the Brussels Criminal Court from March 14 to April 22, 2022, the federal prosecutor's office announced on Friday, June 4.
These are suspects not selected in the French legal proceedings, whom Belgium suspects of having helped the perpetrators of these attacks which killed 130 people.
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On Friday, a first preparatory hearing before the Brussels court set a six-week window, from Monday March 14 to Friday April 22, for the trial to be held. A second preparatory hearing is scheduled for next October to specify the pace of the hearings each week, said Eric Van Duyse, spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office. The fourteen defendants, most of whom must answer for "
participation in the activities of a terrorist group
", are suspected in particular of having transported or accommodated certain attackers. Prepared in large part in Belgium, where the jihadist cell had half a dozen hideouts, the attacks very quickly led to the opening of an investigation by the anti-terrorism justice in Brussels.
In this file called “
Paris Bis
”, the investigators targeted all forms of support provided to the authors. Including Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commandos who struck Paris, whose run lasted four months until his arrest in the Belgian capital on March 18, 2016. One of the suspects, Abid Aberkane, will be tried for hiding the fugitive jihadist at his mother's home in the last few days before the arrest.
The other defendants also gravitated in the entourage of Salah Abdeslam, of his friend Mohamed Abrini, "
the man in the hat
" who gave up blowing himself up at the time of the Brussels attacks (32 dead on March 22, 2016), or in the entourage of brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui, two of the suicide bombers who died in this double attack perpetrated by the same jihadist cell. One of the Abrini brothers is among the defendants.
Among these 14 suspects, two should be tried in their absence because they have never been arrested and probably died in Syria, even though Belgian justice has no formal proof. They are Sammy Djedou, whose death was announced by the Pentagon in December 2016, and Youssef Bazarouj, another Belgian suspected of having been associated in Syria with the ISIS external operations cell. He was also reportedly killed in a war zone. In the French procedure, 20 people were referred to the special court of assizes in Paris, where the trial is to be held from September 8, 2021 to the end of March 2022.
