BRUSSELS: A Belgian court on Monday sentenced the sole surviving suspect in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, to 20 years in prison on 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 shootout in which four police officers were wounded.
Judges at the court in Brussels said 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.
“The terrorist nature of the facts under question in March 2016 appears to be established,” the judgment said.
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 jihadist group, in which 130 people died.
The 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.
