Judicial Error Frees Moroccan Drug Trafficker from Belgian Prison Sentence

Spain had asked Belgium to execute the 6-year prison sentence imposed on a Moroccan residing in Belgium, convicted in 2010 in Barcelona. Mohamed M., 38, was suspected of being the head of a criminal organization active in international drug trafficking. He had already served 4 to 5 months in pre-trial detention in Spain before joining Brussels at the end of 2019. He had 5 and a half years of detention left.

In a decision handed down on Thursday, the Brussels council chamber ruled that the sentence handed down in February 2010 was time-barred as of December 2020. Consequently, the convicted person will not return to prison. Spain had sent its request to Belgium on April 1, 2019, which only recognized the judgment on October 1, 2020, reports La Dernière Heure. A judicial blunder that benefited Mohamed.

"Without the intervention of the council chamber, the client was going to have to serve 5 and a half years and it is clear that he would have done them, because it was indeed the will of Spain. No one would have told him that the sentence was time-barred," comment his lawyers Hamid El Abouti and Mounir Bennaoum.