The trial of the 2016 attacks in Brussels postponed for several weeks

Published on: 09/23/2022 – 15:55 The trial of the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels was postponed for several weeks after it was due to start in mid-October, the Brussels Court of Appeal announced on Friday. The jury composition hearing, scheduled for October 10, is “cancelled” due to the impossibility of delivering the new box of the accused on this date. The trial of the 2016 jihadist attacks in Brussels, which was to begin in mid-October, has been postponed for several weeks, the Belgian capital’s court of appeal announced on Friday, September 23. In a letter to the president of the Court of Assizes, the Ministry of Justice confirmed that the new dock for the accused requested by the court could not be delivered on October 10, the date initially scheduled for the composition of the jury. This hearing is therefore “cancelled” as well as the one which was to mark the start of the debates on October 13, the same source said. “There is a question for the moment of a postponement of a few weeks,” Luc Hennart, spokesman for the court of appeal, told AFP. Replacement of the accused’s box Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne, questioned on Friday morning by the Flemish public radio, had himself said to expect a postponement of a few weeks. “It’s more a matter of weeks than months,” he said. On the morning of March 22, 2016, two jihadists blew themselves up at Brussels-Zaventem airport, and a third an hour later. late in the metro of the European capital. Balance sheet: 32 dead and more than 340 wounded. The investigation quickly established that the attackers came from the same jihadist cell already at the origin of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in France (130 dead in Paris and Saint-Denis). This trial concerns in particular the French jihadist Salah Abdeslam, sentenced this year to irreducible life imprisonment in France for the Parisian attacks. was completed at the end of June in Paris for the attacks of November 13. This Brussels trial, presented as “historic” in Belgium – the largest ever organized before an assize court in this country – also concerns around a thousand civil parties , injured or relatives of victims claiming compensation for damage. On January 16, the court had ordered during a preliminary hearing the dismantling of the current box compartmentalized into individual glass cells, judging this system that violates the rights of the defense due in particular to communication problems between the defendants and their lawyers. With AFP