A court in Brussels has found six men guilty of terrorist murder, more than seven years after suicide bomb attacks killed 32 people at the city’s airport and a metro station in March 2016.
After a long trial and 19 days of jury deliberations, the court in Brussels returned their verdicts.
Several of those on trial had already been convicted of taking part in the Paris terror attacks months earlier.
Salah Abdeslam was arrested days before the Brussels bombings.
He was found guilty in France last year of the 2015 Paris bomb and gun attacks in which 130 died. The Belgian trial, which began last December, has now convicted him of murder and attempted murder in Brussels too.
Another of those now found guilty of both bombings, Mohamed Abrini, was identified on CCTV fleeing Zaventem airport when his explosives did not go off.
He became known as the “man in the hat” and was among a number of suspects arrested in Brussels a few weeks later.
Four other men were found guilty of terrorist murder: Oussama Atar, Osama Krayem, Ali El Haddad Asufi and Bilal El Makhoukhi.
Krayem had been seen with the Metro bomber who blew himself up at Maelbeek. But Atar, a Belgian-Moroccan jihadist thought to have planned the Paris attacks from Syria, was tried in absentia and is believed to have died in Syria.
The attacks in Brussels took place within an hour of each other on 22 March 2016.
Two bombs went off shortly before 08:00 at opposite ends of the departures hall at Zaventem airport, leaving 16 people dead.
Then, little more than an hour later, a further blast happened on a train at Maelbeek metro station in Brussels’ European quarter, close to EU institutions. Another 16 people died in that bombing.
The court was told that another four people who died in the years following the bombings should also be considered victims of the attacks, bringing the death toll to 36.
Hundreds more were wounded.
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5 December 2022
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9 April 2016
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