Salah Abdeslam sentenced to life in prison in 2022 (File)
Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of the jihadist squad that carried out the 2015 attacks in Paris, was extradited from Belgium to France on Wednesday after serving a life sentence.
Following Belgian authorities’ announcement, French Justice Minister Eric Dupont Moretti announced that the 34-year-old suspect had been transferred to a Paris-area prison.
Abdeslam was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 for the worst attack in France’s history, which killed 130 people in the French capital in November 2015.
He was also found guilty of planning an attack that killed 32 people in Brussels the following year after being sent to Belgium for trial in September last year.
His return to France was subsequently held up due to legal disputes.
Belgium’s federal prosecutor’s office said Abdeslam was taken from a prison in Brussels to the border on Wednesday morning and handed over to French authorities.
Abdeslam was one of 10 members of the Islamic State group who attacked multiple targets in Paris, including a France-Germany soccer match, a cafe terrace and the packed Bataclan concert hall.
About 90 people died in the Bataclan alone. In total, more than 350 people were injured. Nine of Abdeslam’s attackers either blew themselves up or were killed by police.
After the attack, Abdeslam fled to Brussels and was arrested days before the attacks on Brussels airport and metro station in March 2016.
Since then, Abdeslam has been detained primarily in France, but his lawyers are fighting to be allowed to serve time in Belgium. Although he holds French nationality, he grew up there and has family ties there.
The Brussels Court of Appeal blocked his extradition to France over concerns that doing so would violate the European Convention on Human Rights and the protection of the right to “family life.”
“Legally irrevocable”
“It is perfectly logical for him to serve his sentence in Belgium,” said Delphine Paci, 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 monitoring of his communications by authorities.
Pasi denounced the transfer as a “grave violation of the rule of law.”
“There was clearly collusion between the Belgian state and the French state in violation of the court’s decision,” she said. “This is clearly about some kind of thirst for revenge that takes precedence over the rule of law.”
Belgian prosecutors argued that Belgium’s legal agreement with France to transfer prisoners overrides the civil appeals court’s ruling against the transfer.
The agency said in a statement that Abdeslam’s return to France following the Belgian criminal case was always planned and “legally irreversible.”
“There is now no room for France to extend the period of Salah Abdeslam’s detention in Belgium,” he added, arguing that Belgium may no longer have legal grounds to detain him.
“Releasing him clearly was not an option,” the statement said.
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