Salah Abdeslam was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 (file photo)
Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the jihadist group that carried out attacks in Paris in 2015, was transferred from Belgium to France on Wednesday to serve out a life sentence.
After Belgian authorities announced the move, French Justice Minister Eric Dupont-Moretti said the 34-year-old man had been transferred to a prison in the Paris region.
Abdeslam was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 for the November 2015 attack in the French capital that killed 130 people, the worst attack in the country’s history.
In September last year, he was also found guilty of planning an attack that killed 32 people in Brussels the following year and was sent to Belgium to stand trial.
His move back to France has since been hampered by legal disputes.
The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said Abdeslam was taken from a Brussels prison to the border on Wednesday morning and handed over to French authorities.
Abdeslam was part of a 10-member Islamic State group that attacked multiple targets in Paris, including a Franco-German football match, a café terrace and the packed Bataclan concert hall.
About 90 people died in the Bataclan Theater alone. More than 350 people were injured. Nine of Abduslam’s fellow attackers blew themselves up or were shot dead by police.
After the attack, Abdeslam fled to Brussels and was arrested days before the March 2016 attacks on Brussels airport and metro stations.
Abdeslam has been detained mainly in France since then, but his lawyers have fought to be allowed to serve his sentence in Belgium, where he grew up and has family ties, despite his French citizenship.
The Brussels Court of Appeal suspended his return to France over concerns it violated the European Convention on Human Rights and its protection of the right to “family life”.
“Legally irrevocable”
“It is completely logical that he would serve his sentence in Belgium,” said Delphine Patch, one of his lawyers.
Another lawyer, Harold Sachs, criticized the conditions of his detention in France, saying they included solitary confinement, video surveillance and excessive surveillance of his communications by authorities.
Patch blasted the transfer as a “blatant violation of the rule of law.”
“There is clear collusion between the Belgian and French governments in violation of the court’s ruling,” she said. “This is clearly a desire for revenge that takes precedence over the rule of law.”
The Belgian prosecutor’s office argued that a legal agreement between Belgium and France on the transfer of prisoners superseded a civil appeals court ruling against the transfer.
It said in a statement that Abdeslam’s return to France following criminal proceedings in Belgium was always planned and “legally irrevocable”.
“France has no further scope to extend Salah Abdeslam’s detention in Belgium,” it added, arguing that Belgium could find itself without legal grounds to detain him.
“Releasing him is clearly not an option,” the statement said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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