Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect in the 2015 Paris attacks, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Belgium after being found guilty of the attempted murder of police officers in a shootout in Brussels in March 2016.
Abdeslam’s accomplice, Sofien Ayari, was also given a 20-year sentence for his role in the shooting, which left four officers injured. Neither man appeared in court, as judges read out their verdict during a three-hour session at the Palais de Justice in Brussels.
The two men were also convicted for possessing firearms and each fined €12,000.
Abdeslam is being held in a high-security prison in northern France. His trial on charges relating to the Paris attacks, which left 130 dead, is expected to begin in 2020.
After the Paris atrocities, Abdeslam fled to Belgium, hiding out in different locations in the capital. Belgian police discovered him by chance, when a routine visit to what they thought was an empty flat turned into a shootout.
Four police officers were injured when the occupants fired Kalashnikovs at them from a flat in the quiet Brussels neighbourhood of Forest on 15 March 2016.
Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent, and Ayari, a Tunisian national, were together in a back room during the shootout at Rue du Dries, while a third suspect, Mohamed Belkaïd, who “most probably” aided the Paris attacks, was killed in the gunfire. The pair left fingerprints and DNA all over the flat, including on the weapons, the court heard earlier.
Abdeslam fled over the rooftops, but was captured in Brussels a few days later. Four days after his arrest, terrorists in the same cell carried out the Brussels bombings that killed 32 people at the airport and on the metro.
The judges ruled against a request from a group representing victims of the Brussels attacks to be a civil party to the case, TV channel RTBF reported. This means the injured police officers remain the only parties to the case. A lawyer for the association V-Europe said the group would petition for a change in the law.
Prosecutors had asked for 20-year jail terms for the men, while Abdeslam’s lawyer, Sven Mary, wanted him acquitted over a procedural error. Mary said the whole case should be thrown out, because a routine court document naming the judges should have been issued in Dutch, rather than French.
On the first day of the trial, Abdeslam proclaimed that he would only put his “trust in Allah” and accused the court of being biased against Muslims. He refused to answer questions and did not attend the remainder of the proceedings.