Brussels Jewish museum killer Mehdi Nemmouche faces life in jail after guilty verdict

Brussels Jewish museum killer Mehdi Nemmouche is facing life in jail after being found guilty of the ‘terrorist murder’ of four people.

The 33-year-old was armed with a Kalashnikov and a handgun as he went on a rampage lasting less than 90 seconds at the museum in the Belgian capital in May 2014.

The atrocity was Europe’s first attack by an Islamist fighter returning from the war in Syria. 

Sporting a trimmed beard and wearing a navy blue sweater, Nemmouche showed no emotion and stared into space as the verdict was delivered.

The 12 jurors, accompanied by the presiding judge and two other magistrates, had deliberated for two and a half days in secret at a Brussels hotel before returning their verdict. Sentencing is now not expected to take place before Monday, the court said. 

Jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche (pictured) has been found guilty of carrying out a massacre at a Jewish museum in Belgium

Jihadist Mehdi Nemmouche (pictured) has been found guilty of carrying out a massacre at a Jewish museum in Belgium

Prosecutors claimed Nemmouche fought with ISIS in Syria. The 12 jurors also found fellow Frenchman Nacer Bendrer 30, who was accused of supplying the weapons, to be the co-author of the attack. The two defendants are shown in a court sketch

Prosecutors claimed Nemmouche fought with ISIS in Syria. The 12 jurors also found fellow Frenchman Nacer Bendrer 30, who was accused of supplying the weapons, to be the co-author of the attack. The two defendants are shown in a court sketch

The 12 jurors, accompanied by the presiding judge and two other magistrates, had deliberated for two and a half days in secret at a Brussels hotel before returning their verdict. There was high security outside the court room yesterday (pictured)

The 12 jurors, accompanied by the presiding judge and two other magistrates, had deliberated for two and a half days in secret at a Brussels hotel before returning their verdict. There was high security outside the court room yesterday (pictured)

The 12 jurors, accompanied by the presiding judge and two other magistrates, had deliberated for two and a half days in secret at a Brussels hotel before returning their verdict. There was high security outside the court room yesterday (pictured)

This CCTV image from the day of the attack shows the suspect of the killings in the Jewish Museum in Brussels

This CCTV image from the day of the attack shows the suspect of the killings in the Jewish Museum in Brussels

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’. 

Presiding judge Laurence Massart, who read out the jury’s verdict, said: ‘The existence of a trap was not presented with enough credibility and must be ruled out.’ 

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 argument involves 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.

The defence team has suggested that the Riva couple were intelligence agents murdered by an unknown 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 on Tuesday, describing the arguments presented by the defence as ‘complete nonsense’ against compelling evidence.

Miriam Riva worked for Mossad but, as an accountant, she was not operational, said the investigating judges who travelled to Israel during their investigation.

Belgian police transport Mehdi Nemmouche back to prison from the courthouse after he was found guilty

Belgian police transport Mehdi Nemmouche back to prison from the courthouse after he was found guilty

Nemmouche was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun as he went on a rampage that left four dead at the museum in Brussels in May 2014

Nemmouche was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun as he went on a rampage that left four dead at the museum in Brussels in May 2014

Police issued this CCTV grab of a man entering the museum. He was wearing a blue shirt and dark trousers, and carrying two shoulder bags

Police issued this CCTV grab of a man entering the museum. He was wearing a blue shirt and dark trousers, and carrying two shoulder bags

Yohan Benizri, the head of Belgium’s Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organisations, denounced what he called a ‘nauseating conspiracy theory’. 

The 12 jurors also found fellow Frenchman Nacer Bendrer, 30, who was accused of supplying the weapons, to be the co-author of the attack.

Seated next to Nemmouche in the defendant’s box, encased by bullet-proof glass on the sides, Bendrer then hung his head low for a few minutes before covering it with his hands. He also faces a life jail sentence. 

The investigation showed that the two men had dozens of telephone conversations in April 2014, when Nemmouche allegedly prepared the attack.

Six days after the massacre, Nemmouche was arrested in the French city of Marseille in possession of a revolver and a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle.

At the trial, Bendrer admitted that the 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 investigators 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.

The verdict said: ‘The defence limited itself to outlining a set of scattered deductions without ever elaborating on them.’

It added that Bendrer, by supplying the weapons, was aware of aiding a crime committed by ‘a longstanding radical,’ alluding to Nemmouche.

‘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 by a jihadist returning from fighting in Syria.

The Brussels killings came 18 months before the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks which left 130 dead. 

Nemmouche’s journey from a French foster home to a Brussels court began not in a Middle Eastern desert but in a run-down industrial town. 

He is already a case study in the radicalisation of some young European Muslims.

Belgium and France, in particular, fear the defeat of groups like ISIS in Syria will send more angry young men homewards.

There was high security outside the Brussels Palace of Justice in the Belgian capital yesterday

There was high security outside the Brussels Palace of Justice in the Belgian capital yesterday

A jury last night found the 33-year-old Frenchman guilty of carrying out the anti-Semitic mass murder. Police are pictured outside the Brussels Palace of Justice yesterday

A jury last night found the 33-year-old Frenchman guilty of carrying out the anti-Semitic mass murder. Police are pictured outside the Brussels Palace of Justice yesterday

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. 

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, investigators 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 Parisian 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 offences 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.

‘What an enormous waste,’ his former lawyer Soulifa Badaoui said after the museum murders, lamenting the fact that the authorities had not helped Nemmouche to integrate.

‘No one knew what to do with an intelligent, lively young man who wanted to get out, become an ordinary French citizen,’ she told AFP. 

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 proselytiser’ who tried to organise 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 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.

‘When he greets me with a warm, relaxed smile it’s as if we’re not in prison,’ defence counsel Francis Vuillemin told AFP. ‘The walls seem to slip off him.’

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