Even if he abandoned his bomb at the airport, Mohamed Abrini "did not renounce the attacks" of March 2016 in Brussels and must be considered as a co-perpetrator, said Tuesday the prosecution in its indictment.
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It is intimately linked to the making of TATP and discussions on targets. Without his assistance the crime could not have been committed, "said federal prosecutor Bernard Michel, distinguishing between the "co-perpetrators" and accomplices of the attacks, without naming names.
'The man in the hat'
Abrini, a 38-year-old Belgian-Moroccan, is one of ten defendants in the trial of attacks claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group that left 32 dead and hundreds injured on March 22, 2016 in the Belgian capital. Tried in particular for "murder in a terrorist context" he faces life imprisonment.
If convicted, his sentence would complement that already pronounced in Paris in June 2022 for the attacks of November 13, 2015 (life with 22 years of security). Attacks committed by the same jihadist cell. On the eve of the attacks that targeted the Bataclan in particular, Mohamed Abrini had accompanied the "convoy of death" in the French capital.
In the Belgian case, where he is still on trial alongside his childhood friend Salah Abdeslam, Abrini is known as the "man in the hat", filmed by video surveillance with the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up at Brussels-Zaventem international airport. "Cowardly or by reflex of survival, he gave up blowing himself up, but he did not give up the attacks," continued Bernard Michel, at the first of five days of hearing devoted to the indictment. "When he gets into the taxi with the others (on the morning of March 22) he knows that the operation can only result in deaths," the prosecutor added.
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The latter presented Abrini as a convinced follower of radical Islam, who became after his short stay in Syria in the summer of 2015 one of the trusted men of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November 13 attacks on behalf of IS. Abaaoud died in a police assault in Saint-Denis, near Paris, on November 18, 2015.
In the jihadist cell largely constituted in Belgium, Abrini was "an active member of the first hour", "central witness of the projects that materialized on March 22", still considered Mr. Michel. A total of three men blew themselves up on 22 March 2016; two at Zaventem airport and another, an hour later, in a metro station in Brussels' European district.