For over two months, the sole surviving Paris Attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam, has been on trial in Belgium in connection with the Brussels shootout that led to his March 2016 arrest. Abdeslam has, by all continuing accounts, been wholly uncooperative while insisting that his silence didn’t make him a criminal. Yet he has been found guilty of attempting to murder police during the terror-related shootout that injured four officers, along with illegally possessing weapons.
Along with his accomplice in the shootout, Sofien Ayari (who was more forthcoming, admitting to police that he trained in Syria), Abdeslam has been sentenced to 20 years behind bars. The duo has also received a hefty fine, according to The Guardian:
Judges said there could be no doubt about the pair’s commitment to radicalism as the maximum jail term requested by Belgian prosecutors was handed down. The two men were also convicted for possessing firearms and each fined £s;12,000.
Abdeslam, who is being held in a high-security prison in northern France, is expected to go on trial for the Paris attacks in 2020, on charges of murder linked to a terrorist organisation.
Abdeslam, age 28, likely won’t ever see freedom again. Not only will he be jailed for decades after this trial, but he’ll also go on trial in France sometime in 2020. Specifically, he is known as the so-called eighth Paris terror suspect, and he’s accused of helping to coordinate travel logistics and scouting locations for the coordinated ISIS attacks in November 2015 that killed 130 people. Despite his Brussels sentencing on Monday, he already awaits the next phase of his reckoning in a French jail.
(Via The Guardian)