Ten men accused of involvement in the March 2016 bomb attacks in Brussels that killed 32 people will face trial, Belgian federal prosecutors said Friday, according to AFP.
Six of the suspects, including 32-year-old French-Moroccan Salah Abdeslam, are currently on trial in France over the November 2015 Paris attacks which were claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization.
"Ten of those charged were today ordered to stand trial in the Court of Assizes by the indictment chamber in Brussels," spokesman Eric Van Duyse tweeted.
On March 22, 2016 two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Brussels international airport and a third in a crowded Metro station in Brussels.
Investigators linked the gang that carried out the attacks in Belgium to the earlier attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130 people.
Just like the Paris attacks, the Brussels attacks were claimed by ISIS.
Abdeslam is the best known of the suspects, allegedly the only surviving member of the group directly involved in the Paris attacks, arrested after a shootout in Brussels.
Abdeslam has also been convicted in a Belgian court for trying to kill police during the shootout in Brussels in 2016. The court sentenced Abdeslam and a co-accused to 20 years in prison in 2018.
He was also designated by the United States as a "global terrorist", meaning that sanctions freezing any assets in US jurisdiction and forbidding Americans to do business with him will be imposed.
This week, Abdeslam acknowledged his role in the Paris attacks for the first time, telling a French court that the coordinated killings were retaliation for French air strikes on ISIS and that the deaths of 130 innocent people in the attacks were “nothing personal”.
Following Friday's decision, the Belgian case is likely to start in September 2022 and last a year.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)