Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving terrorist in the commemoration of the November 2015 massacres in Paris, will appear on Monday in court in Brussels for a crime committed while in hiding in Belgium. The trial had been scheduled for last December but, at the request of the defense lawyers, it was postponed.
Abdeslam, during all twenty-one months of detention in France, never answered the questions that the investigators asked him.
The defendant will have to respond to a crime committed during a shooting in Forest on 15 2016 March, three days before he was arrested in Brussels along with Sofiane Ayari, one of the accomplices who had helped him during his hiding.
In the shooting - which took place during a routine search of an allegedly empty apartment - three policemen were injured and an Algerian jihadist, who had covered the escape of the two accomplices, was killed.
Both Abdeslam and Ayane will face charges of "attempted murder of numerous police officers in a terrorist context" and of "carrying weapons prohibited in a terrorist context", and if convicted they face up to 40 years in prison.
The trial should last a little over a week, in a Palace of Justice where the maximum security conditions have been activated; Abdeslam will travel the 150 kilometers that separate the classroom from the French prison of Vendin-le-Vieil every day, escorted by the army's elite units.