The Belgian justice orders the return to prison of one of the 'Qatargate' suspects

Belgian justice wants to keep the main suspects in

, the scandal of alleged bribery from Qatar and Morocco to prominent figures in the European Parliament that has shaken the community institutions this month.

An appeals court in Brussels has ordered this Tuesday the return to prison of one of the suspects who was on probation, the Italian Niccolo Figa-Talamanca.

As announced by the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the main suspect in the plot, the former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, has also appeared before a judge, who will continue in preventive detention —as he already was— until the next review of his case, set for mid-January .

Figa-Talamanca directed the Brussels branch of the NGO No Peace Without Justice, founded by former European Commissioner Emma Bonino.

The organization shared offices and many activities with Fight Impunity, another NGO founded in 2019 by Panzeri and which is suspected of being used as a front for the bribery plot.

The Italian Bonino was part of its honorary board, as were the former EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Federica Mogherini, also Italian, the former Greek Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, the former French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve or the Nobel Peace Prize winner from 2018, Denis Mukwege.

Everyone has already distanced themselves from Fight Impunity, while the European Commission assures that it is investigating the ties of the European institutions with that NGO and the financing of this organization.

Figa-Talamanca, also Italian, was arrested on December 9, as part of the major police operation carried out that day and which ended with the arrest of Panzeri, as well as the then still Vice President of the European Parliament Eva Kaili and her partner, the parliamentary assistant Francesco Giorgi, in addition to the seizure of 1.5 million euros in cash.

The four are accused of corruption, money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization.

However, an investigating judge decided on December 14 to grant supervised release —with an electronic bracelet— to Figa-Talamanca.

The Belgian Federal Prosecutor's Office appealed the decision, which was finally reversed at the hearing on Tuesday, in the

that the resumption of his preventive detention has been ordered.

Meanwhile, although it was Panzeri's defense that also requested the hearing this Tuesday, they finally ended up requesting during this act that the case be dealt with in a new hearing set for January 17.

No official explanations have been given for this decision, which means that the former Italian MEP will remain in pretrial detention until then, like Figa-Talamanca, Giorgi and Kaili, whose stay in prison was confirmed last week despite the fact that his defense claimed his innocence and assured that he was "collaborating" with justice.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper

, the lawyer for the former Greek vice president, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, insisted on Tuesday that Kaili "did not know anything about the money they found in her house", 150,000 euros in cash, plus around half a million in a suitcase that his father tried to take out of a hotel, allegedly warned by his daughter.

In addition, she "always voted according to her conscience" in the Eurochamber, assured the lawyer, according to the Efe agency.

"Eva Kaili is living a nightmare in prison, a catastrophe, because she is innocent," stressed the lawyer, according to whom, "the only person who visited her on Christmas Day was her father," initially also detained, but released two days later, like another suspect in the plot, the Italian trade unionist Luca Visentini, who has admitted that he received 50,000 euros from the Panzeri NGO for his campaign to be re-elected general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (CIS), but He denies having made any kind of compensation.

According to Dimitrakopoulos, who also visited Kaili last week in the Brussels prison where she has been held since her arrest, the ousted European vice president "feels betrayed" after reading the investigation file.

“She used her name without her knowledge,

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