Security high as Jewish museum attack trial starts

The trial of a “very polite” Frenchman accused of shooting four people dead at a Jewish museum in Brussels – allegedly the first Syria jihad veteran to stage a terror attack in Europe – opened on Thursday.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 33, faces a life sentence if convicted of the killings in the Belgian capital on May 24 2014, following his return from Syria’s battlefields.

Both Nemmouche and Nacer Bendrer, a fellow Frenchman aged 30 who allegedly supplied the weapons, were due to hear the 200-page charge sheet against them in the first two days of the trial being held in a Brussels criminal court under heavy security.

Nemmouche sat down in the dock accompanied by two police officers in balaclavas.

Bendrer sat about 2m from him, accompanied by a policewoman whose face was visible.

Both have previously denied charges of “terrorist murder” for the anti-Semitic 82-second shooting spree.

More than 100 witnesses are due to testify at the trial.

Firing a pistol and then an assault rifle, the gunman killed two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer and a Belgian receptionist at the Brussels Jewish Museum.

Six days after the attack, Nemmouche – born in France to a family of Algerian origin – was arrested in the French port city of Marseille, where he arrived on a bus from Brussels.

Investigators say he was carrying a handgun and an assault rifle used in the shooting.

They say he fought with a jihadist faction in Syria from 2013 to 2014, where he met Najim Laachraoui, a member of the gang which went on to carry out suicide bombings in Brussels that killed 32 people in March 2016.

Nemmouche and Bendrer, investigators say, met nearly a decade ago while in prison in France, where they were both described as “radicalised”.

Bendrer was arrested in Marseille seven months after the Jewish museum attack.

Nemmouche is expected to face a separate trial in France for holding French journalists hostage in Syria.