Prosecutor Paule Somers paused as she read the indictment and apologized: “Now comes a particularly difficult moment. Then, in her fine voice, she named the cause of death of 32 women and men, name by name, diagnosis by diagnosis, drawn up by coroners. Some of the victims have been blown beyond recognition by the explosions triggered by three suicide bombers at Brussels’ Zaventem Airport and Brussels’ Maelbeek metro station. Tears flowed from family members listening in the courtroom.
It took more than six and a half years for the Belgian trauma of the Islamist terrorist attacks of March 22, 2016 to be dealt with in court. Much too long, criticized representatives of the victims. An additional two months have passed because the presiding judge, Laurence Massart, ordered the courtroom to be remodeled in September. According to the will of the Belgian Ministry of Justice, the accused should follow the trial in individual cells made of high-security glass, the defense lawyers protested against the isolation of their clients and were right. And so the trial had given the defendants a victory even before it actually began, an embarrassment for the Belgian state.
The indictment is 500 pages
Now the public prosecutor has the floor. She has three days to read out the 500-page indictment. The process will take at least eight months. The country has never seen a more complex procedure.
A high-security court building called “Justitia” has been built on the site of the former NATO headquarters for many millions of euros. The staffing of the court also required a great deal of effort. Not professional judges, but the whole of Belgian society should pass judgment on the ten men who are held responsible for the attacks. That is the idea behind the “people’s jury”, as the jury is called in Belgium. Thousands of women and men were asked to make themselves available. 300 canceled, many felt overwhelmed by the task. In the end, twelve jurors and 24 alternate candidates were chosen by lot.
Judge Massart on Tuesday told the jury how to do their job: secretive from the public and open to any argument presented in the courtroom, impartial but not naïve. The indictment was then handed to them to read while Paule Somers and her colleague Bernard Michel took turns speaking.
The two went back to the origins of the “Islamic State”, whose struggle in Syria and Iraq also fascinated many young Belgians with Muslim roots. They mentioned the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014, which claimed four lives, and the shooting on a Thalys train in August 2015. The perpetrators were both from Belgium. The terrorist cell that killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, 2015 also operated from Brussels; the rest of the group then began to prepare new attacks. It hit Brussels.
Salah Abdeslam was sentenced to life imprisonment in Paris
In the next few months, the Brussels court will have to fight against the impression that it is only pursuing a secondary exploitation. Six men who are in the dock here were convicted in Paris in the summer of their involvement in the November 13, 2015 attacks, including Salah Abdeslam, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. At the trial in Paris, he was the only survivor of the ten-strong death squad, willingly accepting the leading role. When asked about his job there, he replied: “I gave up all my jobs to become a fighter for the Islamic State.” He answered the same question in Brussels on Monday: “Electric mechanic.”
The prosecution will try to establish that Abdeslam encouraged the rest of the group to take action in November 2015 immediately after the Paris attacks and played a key role in preparing attacks. The defense will point out that Salah Abdeslam was not involved in mixing the explosives and was caught by police four days before the suicide bombers left. Abdeslam feels no connection to these acts, his lawyers said in an interview with the Brussels newspaper over the weekend Le Soir.
Salah Abdeslam also had a copy of the indictment handed to him on Tuesday so that he could read it – as if he wanted to better understand what the Belgian public prosecutor was accusing him of.