After 18 days of deliberations, late Tuesday, July 25th, a Belgian jury found six suspects guilty of their involvement in the March 22nd, 2016 attacks on Brussels’ airport and a metro station, Belgian media report.
The six men have been convicted of terrorist murder and attempted murder. These six, plus two others, were also found guilty of being part of a terrorist organization. Two brothers, Smail and Ibrahim Farisi, were acquitted on all counts.
As per Belgian law, their sentences will be determined in a second part of the trial, starting on September 4th. Except for the Farisi brothers, most of the remaining accused face life in prison.
The convictions mark the conclusion of the largest trial in Belgium’s judicial history, which, having started in early December, lasted a total of seven months.
Two separate jihadi suicide bombings of the Maalbeek metro station in the EU Quarter and Brussels Airport in Zaventem killed 32 people—a number to which, the court ruled on Tuesday, three victims, like the 23-year-old Shanti De Corte who chose euthanasia, must be added since they did not manage to overcome the mental trauma they had suffered.
In addition to the now-official 35 fatalities, nearly 300 people were injured.
The most notorious of all the defendants in Brussels is Salah Abdeslam, who is already serving a life sentence in France for his role in the 2015 Paris attacks, in which he was the sole survivor out of eight.
The attacks at the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France, and several catering establishments in Paris, which were later claimed by the Islamic State (IS), left 130 people dead.
During these terror strikes, the seven other attackers either blew themselves up or were killed by French police. Abdeslam’s bomb vest failed to work, after which he fled. It was not until months later, in March 2016, that he was arrested in Brussels during an anti-terrorist raid.
Abdeslam and Sofien Ayari, another prominent suspect in the Zaventem airport attack, pleaded not guilty. While the duo had foreknowledge of the planned attack, they were behind bars at the time while keeping quiet about it. Remarkably, Ayari was acquitted of terrorist murder by the jury, along with two other defendants.
The jury found no evidence that he was a co-perpetrator of either the Paris or the Brussels attacks, and was moved by Ayari’s seemingly sincere expression of regret.
To Ayari, who on Tuesday was convicted of belonging to a terrorist organization, for which he could get ten years in prison, his acquittal for charges of murder makes little difference: In Paris, he had already been sentenced to 30 years in prison, while at an earlier trial in Brussels, he had been sentenced to 20 years.
