Trial hints at deadly plan by suspect

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 manwhowas 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 162 people. But Abdeslam refused to stand for the judge or answer her questions.

On Thursday, the lawyer who once quit in frustration pleaded his case oncemore.

The getaway shooting that left three police officers injured, SvenMary 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.

Abdeslam and Ayariwere 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.