Prosecutor: Paris suspect had plans for more terror
At trial in Brussels, she says IS fighter’s guns cache telling.
PARIS — The weapons stockpile in his hideout and the Islamic State fighter covering his getaway with a spray of gunfire were signs of a deadly plot to come, a Belgian prosecutor argued Thursday in the trial of the man who was once Europe’s most wanted fugitive.
Salah Abdeslam refused to attend the final day of his trial in Brussels for a March 15, 2016, shootout with police that ultimately led to his capture.
He left his prison cell in France on Monday — the first public glimpse of the man linked to plots in Paris and Brussels that killed a total of 162 people.
But Abdeslam refused to stand for the judge and told her he wouldn’t answer her questions.
“My silence is my defense,” he said Monday, flanked by masked officers in a heavily guarded courtroom.
On Thursday, the lawyer who once quit defending him in frustration pleaded his case once more.
The getaway shooting that left three police officers injured, Sven Mary argued, “was a spontaneous act, not a terrorist act,” and that the time to try the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks was in 2020 in Paris, not now in Brussels.
Abdeslam and Sofiane Ayari, a former IS fighter, are charged with attempted murder in a terrorist context and face 20 years in prison.
Their lawyers said only the jihadi they left behind to die in the apartment fired on officers as they ran across the rooftops, broke into an apartment and escaped into the Brussels streets.
“We know that they were stockpiling weapons in preparation for terrorist attacks. So if they fled it was only because they had other plans,” Kathleen Grosjean, the prosecutor, said according to the public broadcaster RTBF.
Abdeslam and Ayari were captured on March 18, 2016, in Abdeslam’s home neighborhood of Molenbeek. Grainy video from that day showed him limping into a waiting police car, a gunshot wound to the leg.
Four days later, IS suicide bombers struck the Brussels metro and airport.
The trial in Brussels hinged on who fired a second weapon involved in the shootout: Ayari, Abdeslam or the dead jihadi, Mohamed Belkaid.
Mary said Abdeslam wasn’t responsible for either opening fire or for inciting the shooting.
“Nothing allows us to say that Salah Abdeslam provoked Belkaid into firing on the officers,” Mary said.
Hopes had been high that Abdeslam, who has refused to speak to an investigating judge in France, would shed light on the sprawling network of IS supporters who carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels.
His defiant refusal, however, came as less of a surprise than his decision to attend in the first place.
Authorities say Abdeslam was armed with a suicide belt that reportedly malfunctioned the night of Nov. 13, 2015.
He fled Paris with the help of friends and spent four months on the run — with Ayari and others.
Abdeslam’s brother, Brahim, died in a suicide attack in Paris.
Their childhood friend, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed five days later in a police standoff outside the French capital.
Ayari has said little, but denied that he had fired the Kalashnikov the pair escaped with.
Instead, his lawyer, Isa Gultaslar, indicated Thursday that the IS fighter who was killed in the shootout had been the only man firing on the officers during the police raid.