Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect in the 2015 Paris attacks, has been sentenced in Belgium to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of the attempted murder of police officers in a shootout in Brussels in March 2016.

Abdeslam’s accomplice, Sofien Ayari, was also given a 20-year sentence for his role in the shooting, which left four officers injured. Neither man appeared in court for the three-hour session at the Palais de Justice in Brussels, during which the verdict was read out.

Judges said there could be no doubt about the pair’s commitment to radicalism as the maximum jail term requested by Belgian prosecutors was handed down. The two men were also convicted for possessing firearms and each fined €12,000.

Abdeslam, who is being held in a high-security prison in northern France, is expected to go on trial for the Paris attacks in 2020, on charges of murder linked to a terrorist organisation.

Abdeslam was named Europe’s most wanted man after fleeing to Belgium after the coordinated bombing and shooting attack in the French capital on 13 November 2015, which killed 130 and was claimed by Islamic State.

The attack began when a suicide bomber blew himself up after failing to get into the Stade de France stadium where the then French president, François Hollande, was among 80,000 people watching a France-Germany football match. This was followed by driveby shootings and suicide bombings at cafes and restaurants around the 10th and 11th arrondissements of northern Paris, and an attack at the Bataclan theatre during a rock concert where 89 people were killed.



The death toll was the highest from a terrorist attack in Europe since 191 people lost their lives in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Holland described the Paris attack as an act of war.

Abdeslam hid in different locations in Brussels, a city where he had once run a bar with his brother, a fellow jihadist who blew himself up as part of the Paris attacks.



Belgian police discovered him by chance, when a routine visit to what they thought was an empty flat turned into a shootout. Four police officers were injured when the occupants fired Kalashnikovs at them from a flat in the Forest district of the city on 15 March 2016. A total of 34 shots were fired during the shootout, the judgment said.

Abdeslam, a 28-year old Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent, and Ayari, a 24-year Tunisian national, were part of the same terrorist network. The pair were together in a back room during the shootout at Rue du Dries, while a third suspect, Mohamed Belkaïd, who “most probably” aided the Paris attacks, was killed in the gunfire. The men left fingerprints and DNA all over the flat, including on the weapons, the court heard earlier.

Abdeslam and Ayari fled over the rooftops and escaped via a neighbouring flat. Abdeslam was captured in Brussels three days later. “We got him,” tweeted the Belgian immigration minister. But relief after his capture gave way to horror, when terrorists in the same cell carried out the Brussels bombings that killed 32 people at the airport and on the metro four days later.



Prosecutors had asked for 20-year jail terms for the men, while Abdeslam’s lawyer, Sven Mary, moved for acquittal over a procedural error. Mary said the case should be thrown out, because a routine court document naming the judges should have been issued in Dutch, rather than French.

On the first day of the trial, Abdeslam proclaimed that he would only put his “trust in Allah” and accused the court of being biased against Muslims. He refused to answer questions and did not attend the remainder of the proceedings.

Abdeslam is believed to have been a logistics coordination for the Paris attacks. He was meant to blow himself up at the Stade de France, but later told police he had changed his mind.