[AnNahar] Frenchie Mehdi Nemmouche was found guilty Thursday of the "terrorist murders" of four people at Brussels' Jewish museum, the first case of a Syria jihad veteran to stage an attack in Europe.
Nemmouche, 33, sporting a trimmed beard and wearing a navy blue sweater, showed no emotion and stared into space as the verdict was delivered. He now faces a life sentence for the anti-Semitic attack in the Belgian capital on May 24, 2014, following his return from Syria's battlefields.
Sentencing could be as early as Friday.
The 12 jurors, accompanied by the presiding judge and two other magistrates, had deliberated for more than two days in secret at a Brussels hotel before returning their verdict.
Nemmouche was found to have killed the four victims in cold blood in less than 90 seconds, but he denied the accusation telling the court he had been "tricked."
This referred to arguments made by defence lawyers that Nemmouche was not to blame for the cold-blooded slaughter, but that he was caught up in some kind of plot targeting the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The legal argument had centered around Israeli couple Miriam and Emmanuel Riva, the first two of the four people killed in the attack.
A young Belgian employee, Alexandre Strens, and French volunteer Dominique Sabrier were also murdered.
According to the defense, the museum shooting was not the work of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group but a "targeted execution" aimed at Mossad agents. The defense said the Israeli couple who were killed were in fact Mossad agents murdered by another man who had hunted them down.
The Riva family's lawyers have furiously rejected the theory and said attempts to pass off the tourists as secret agents was "an absolute scandal."
"Let's stop the joking," prosecutor Yves Moreau told the court earlier this week, describing the arguments presented by the defense as "complete nonsense" against compelling evidence.
Miriam Riva worked for Mossad but, as an accountant, she was not operational, said the investigating judges who traveled to Israel during their investigation.
| And really, why would anyone deliberately murder an accountant? That’s crazy talk. |
- 'DEEPLY CONVINCED' -
Yohan Benizri, the head of Belgium's Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations, denounced what he called a "nauseating conspiracy theory."
The 12 jurors also found fellow Frenchie Nacer Bendrer, 30, who was accused of supplying the weapons, to be the co-author of the attack.
The investigation showed that the two men had dozens of telephone conversations in April 2014, when Nemmouche was preparing for the killings.
Six days after the massacre, Nemmouche was placed in durance vile
You have the right to remain silent...
in the French city of Marseille in possession of a revolver and a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle.
At the trial, Bendrer admitted that Nemmouche had asked him for a Kalashnikov when he came to Brussels in early April, but claimed he never delivered it.
Among other personal effects, Nemmouche upon arrest carried a nylon jacket with gunshot residue, as well as a computer in which Sherlocks found six videos claiming the attack with an off-camera voiceover thought to be Nemmouche. In total, the prosecution said it had identified 23 pieces of evidence pointing to Nemmouche, who also physically resembles the shooter seen on the museum's surveillance video.
"We are both deeply convinced that the two accused did indeed commit these acts," one of the two prosecutors said in their indictment.
The prosecutors say the attack was the first carried out in Europe
 ...also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
by a jihadist returning from fighting in Syria.
The Brussels killings came 18 months before the November 13, 2015, Gay Paree attacks which left 130 dead.
Mehdi Nemmouche has been convicted of carrying out Europe’s first terror attack by an Islamist fighter returning from the war in Syria. But his journey from a French foster home to a Brussels court began not in a Middle Eastern desert but in a run-down industrial town.
Separately, he is also accused of acting as the jailer of four French journalists taken hostage by jihadists in Aleppo in 2013.
Nemmouche is already a case study in the radicalization of some young European Moslems. Belgium and La Belle France, in particular, fear the defeat of groups like the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
in Syria will send more angry young men homewards. But Nemmouche seems to have been on a radical path long before he set off, in early 2013, for the so-called "caliphate" on the Euphrates.
The investigation into the May 2014 massacre in the museum has pieced together elements of his background.
TROUBLED AND ANGRY YOUTH
Nemmouche was born on April 17, 1985, in the northern French town of Roubaix, to a family of Algerian origin. He never knew his father and his mother was judged not "capable" of raising him, Sherlocks say.
Aged only three months, he was moved to a foster family in the northern industrial city of Lille, where he would stay ‐ off and on ‐ until he was 16. But his upbringing was not stable. He would make difficult trips to stay with his grandparents, and sometimes to care homes or a Gay Pareeian orphanage.
His foster parents, in documents seen by AFP, describe him as an “angry” youth, “capable of the worst as well as the most kindly” acts.
He committed his first known crime at 13, then at 16, he spent three weeks in a juvenile prison for a hold-up with an air pistol after being convicted by a children’s court. His criminal record grew ever longer in his late teens, with traffic offenses and muggings, and his grandmother lost track of him after his second jail term.
In 2007, aged 22, he headed to Provence in southern France after gaining a vocational qualification as an electrician, but soon fell back into trouble.
‘SADISTIC AND NARCISSISTIC’
Between December 2007 and December 2012, he spent five years in custody — and investigators believe this is when his ideas hardened.In prison, he was known as an “extremist proselytizer” who tried to organize group prayer and spoke of jihad and the 1995 “genocide of Muslims in Bosnia.” This linked him to the “Roubaix gang” — French Islamists who returned from the Bosnian war and carried out robberies to fund Al-Qaeda, some of whom he knew.
When his grandmother saw him in Tourcoing in December 2012, he had a long beard and was praying daily, something she had not seen before.
Less is known about his experiences in Syria, but three former French hostages have identified him as their “strict and violent” overseer.They say he did not hide his admiration for Mohammed Merah, who murdered three French soldiers, a Jewish teacher and three young children in Toulouse in 2012. Former hostage Nicolas Henin told the trial last month that he had “absolutely no doubt” that Nemmouche was his jailer and torturer in Syria. Henin described him as a “sadistic, playful and narcissistic” man.
Nemmouche, who was extradited to Belgium over the museum shooting after being arrested in Marseille, will go on trial in France over the hostages at a later date.
Held under tight security at a prison in Leuze-en-Hainaut, his lawyers describe him as a man of “steely will” who was bearing up well under the pressure of incarceration. |
[IsraelTimes] French jihadist, who killed four people in 2014 anti-Semitic rampage, is accused of acting as jailer to 4 French journalists taken hostage in Aleppo.
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[SG.NEWS.YAHOO] A shadow creeps behind two visitors just inside the Jewish museum in Brussels. A man emerges, arm extended as he fires a pistol into their necks.