Process for attacks in Brussels: the victims hope for answers

The 2016 Brussels airport and metro attack trial is Belgium’s largest trial. 32 people were killed and hundreds injured. For the victims, the trial is a burden – and a conclusion.

Sabine Borgignons can’t remember anything. On March 22, 2016, the young woman was sitting in the Brussels Metro at just after nine o’clock in the rush hour – behind the carriage that a suicide bomber blew up at the Maelbeek station in the European Quarter: “I was in a coma for a month and a half. I’m one of those who have no memory – not of the assassination, not of the treatment, not of the time just before that in my life. There’s six months of emptiness.”

And three months of that she was in the hospital. The Belgian expects one thing above all from the process that has now begun six years later – to finally be able to put an end to what happened back then: “That it will finally stop because there is so much talk about it around me, all the time and now more as the trial begins. I would wish for an end because that would mean putting the assassination behind us.”

Co-plaintiffs want answers

Borgignons is one of around 1,020 joint plaintiffs in the mammoth trial, which is taking place in a former NATO building in the northeast of the Belgian capital. Olivia Venet, as a member of a collective of lawyers, represents about a quarter of them. Her impression: “Above all, the victims want to get answers. They hope to be able to understand how this could happen, how such violence came about, how people could do something like this and why they had to go through all this suffering.”

Gaetan Meuleman is also a joint plaintiff. After the attack, he served as a first aider for the injured who were brought up from the subway tunnel, in a hotel next to the subway entrance that served as an emergency hospital. Even six years later, he struggles to regain composure when he returns to this place: “Many people can’t understand that. They say: ‘That was a long time ago, we’re going to stop commemorating’. But for us it’s present. For me it’s like it happened yesterday. You can’t erase that.”

Gaetan Meuleman has been struggling with mental health problems since the attack. He has changed, he says, has become more aggressive. Meuleman did not receive any help from the state. He didn’t demand it either: “I never saw myself as a victim, the victims – they were the injured.”

Abandoned by the state?

But many of those affected feel let down by the authorities, says lawyer Venet. In Belgium, unlike in France, there is no state fund that provides victims of terrorism with quick help until an insurance company steps in. “Specifically, the victims themselves have to submit applications to the various bodies to find out who can pay them and how, and that’s a problem,” explains victim advocate Venet, “in France they contact the fund, which then takes care of everything and which passes it on to the insurance companies. Here the victims have to take all the steps themselves, and that is extremely difficult and exhausting for them.”

In Belgium, there is no central contact point that tells those affected which institutions to contact, explains terror victim Borgignons. Like them, more than 300 people were injured in the attacks on the Brussels Metro and at Zaventem Airport, many of them seriously, and 32 people died. Nine men are sitting in the dock, another accused is missing.

The public prosecutor accuses eight of them of terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder and membership in a terrorist group. Several defendants had refused to sit in the courtroom in a bulletproof glass box divided into cells. The presiding judge ordered the building to be remodeled: the partitions between the men were removed, the glass front to the hall is now broken so that they can follow the hearing and talk to their lawyers. This delayed the start of the trial by two months.

No anger, just incomprehension and sadness

Borgignons, who was seriously injured in the subway explosion, will face the accused at trial. In her own words, she feels no anger. In the accused, she sees fools who allowed themselves to be seduced: “They let themselves be influenced by what they were told and they believed all that stuff, that they were going to paradise and what do I know. They’re just idiots – those responsible are the people above who promised them all this. I feel incomprehension, not anger. Incomprehension and sadness – because it has damaged many lives. So many victims and all this for I don’t know what”.

Victims and families want answers from the process. But the legal processing of the attacks can only partially provide that, explains lawyer Olivia Venet: “In the end, we will only ever have one judicial truth, never an absolute truth. That also depends on what the accused say in the trial – will they answer questions, will they explain themselves? In any case, we will process the entire investigation. We check everything that investigators, coroners, prosecutors have researched. That will be a kind of answer for the victims. But unfortunately it is very rare that one process brings all the answers.”

Victims are expected to have their say in the process at the end of January. The process is expected to take between six and nine months.