The Belgian Justice sentenced this Friday to 30 years in prison Mohamed Abrini, ‘the man with the hat’ who accompanied the jihadists who died in suicide bomb attacks at Brussels airport in March 2016.
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Mohamed Abrini, the so-called ‘hat man’ who accompanied the jihadists who died in the suicide bombings at Brussels airport on March 22, 2016, was sentenced on Friday, September 15, to 30 years in prison for his participation in these attacks.
As for Salah Abdeslam, one of the co-defendants, the criminal court referred to a previous sentence handed down in 2018 (20 years for a shootout with police officers in March 2016) and did not want to impose an additional sentence on him. The French jihadist continues to be considered by Belgian Justice as one of the co-authors of the Brussels attacks in which 35 people died.
In this process, the court found him guilty, at the end of July, of “murders in a terrorist context”, as did five of his co-defendants. The federal prosecutor’s office had requested a new sentence of life imprisonment for Abdeslam, already sentenced to an irreducible life sentence in June 2022 in Paris for his participation in the attacks of November 13, 2015 (130 deaths).
But the court accepted the arguments of the Frenchman’s defense, who had asked not to accumulate several severe sentences.
The court ruled that Abdeslam’s involvement in preparing the attacks was part of a crime related to the shooting that occurred on rue du Dries in Brussels on March 15, 2016, when he fled a police search in one of the hideouts of the jihadist cell. It is the “continuous manifestation of the same criminal intention,” the judges justified in their motivations.
Without loss of nationality
Among the eight men in total found guilty, at the end of July, of participation or complicity in the attacks of March 22 (35 dead), three received life sentences: Osama Atar (tried in absentia because he is presumed dead in Syria), Osama Krayem and Bilal Al-Makhukhi.
Tunisian Sofien Ayari, already convicted like Abdeslam for the Rue du Dries shooting, benefited from the same legal reasoning as the latter: no additional sentence.
Finally, the Belgian-Moroccan Ali Al-Haddad Asufi and the Belgian-Rwandan Hervé Bayingana Muhirwa were sentenced respectively to 20 and 10 years in prison.
The loss of Belgian nationality was not determined, as the prosecution had desired for five men, including Abrini.
*Article adapted from its original in French
With AFP
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