Paris Attacker gets 20 years over Terror charges in a Bloody Gun-Battle with Police

April 24,2018:

On Monday, Belgian Court sentenced the sole surviving suspect in Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, to 20 years in prison on the terror charges over a bloody gun battle with Police in Brussels days before his capture in 2016.

Abdeslam’s co-defendant Sofiane Ayari received the same sentence after the pair were convicted of terrorism-related attempted murder over the shoot-out in which four police officers were wounded.

Judges at the court in Brussels stated that,“There can be no doubt about their commitment to radicalism” as they handed down the maximum jail term as demanded by Belgian prosecutors at the trial in February.

Judgment stated that,“The terrorist nature of the facts under question in March 2016 appears to be established”.

Neither Abdeslam, 28, a Belgian-born French national, nor Ayari, a 24-year-old Tunisian citizen, was in court to hear the verdict.

Abdeslam is being held in jail in France pending a separate trial over the November 2015 Paris attacks, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, in which 130 people died.

Pair were convicted of opening fire on a team of Belgian and French police who raided a flat in the Forest area of Brussels on March 15, 2016, following a tip-off about the Paris attacks.

An Algerian jihadist was killed in the raid as he provided covering fire for Abdeslam at the time the most wanted man in Europe and Ayari to escape.

Abdeslam was arrested and shot in the leg in a dramatic police operation three days later in the largely immigrant Molenbeek area of the Belgian capital, near his family home.