Brussels Terror Suspect Salah Abdeslam Charged in 2016 Airport and Metro Attacks

The information that had been circulating in the Belgian press for a few days has now been confirmed. "Participation in the activities of a terrorist group": this is how the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office has ruled on Salah Abdeslam, 29 years old, and thus charged him in the suicide attacks, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, which had left 32 dead and more than 340 injured at Brussels International Airport and in a metro station in the European capital.

According to Le Figaro, these attacks had been commissioned from Syria and organized by a Franco-Belgian cell also behind the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris (130 dead).

This indictment of Salah Abdeslam comes as the trial of the Brussels jihadist attacks is announced to open next year at the former NATO site in the Belgian capital and is expected to last 6 to 8 months. It should be noted that 12 other people had already been charged in the March 22 case in Brussels, which also has some 800 civil parties. Among them are notably Mohamed Abrini and Osama Krayem, arrested in April 2016, cited among the main suspects in these attacks. According to the same source, the former has admitted to being "the man in the hat" pushing a suitcase full of explosives on a cart alongside the two airport suicide bombers, after which he abandoned it and fled.

As for the trial related to the Paris attacks, it will be held in 2021. Here, among others, fourteen people, eleven of whom are in pre-trial detention, are being investigated in this case.