Salah Abdeslam, who was sentenced to life in prison for the 2015 Paris jihadist attacks, was extradited from Belgium to France on Wednesday, his lawyer said.
Abdeslam is the only survivor of the Islamic State group, which killed 130 people in the French capital in November 2015.
He was found guilty at a trial in Belgium in September last year for the 2016 attacks in Brussels, but was prevented from returning to France due to human rights concerns.
“They picked him up in his cell at 9am this morning and he left for France,” Delphine Paci, Abdeslam’s lawyer, told AFP.
“This is a clear violation of the rule of law,” she said. “There was clear collusion between the Belgian state and the French state to violate the court’s decision.”
“This is clearly about some kind of thirst for revenge that has taken precedence over the rule of law,” Pasi charged.
Abdeslam fled to Brussels after taking part in the 2015 Paris attacks, where he barricaded himself in an apartment occupied by members of a local cell for four months.
He was arrested days before the suicide bombings that killed 32 people and injured hundreds at Brussels’ airport and metro station in March 2016. A Belgian jury found him to be one of the co-planners of those attacks.
After his trial in Brussels, he was scheduled to be transferred to France to serve the remainder of his sentence.
However, the Brussels Court of Appeal blocked the transfer over concerns that it would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
Abdeslam’s lawyers argued he should be allowed to serve his sentence in Belgium, where he grew up and has family ties despite his French citizenship.
Both the Paris and Brussels massacres were part of a series of attacks claimed by Islamic State in Europe.
alm-jca/ec/rmb/rox