Belgium will be on high alert today as the last surviving suspect in the 2015 Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, stands trial in Brussels over a shootout that led to his capture.
Abdeslam, 28, left a jail near the French capital early Monday, together with a convoy of tactical police vehicles.
Hundreds of Belgian security forces will protect the court building.
Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent, is charged with “attempting to murder several police officers in a terrorist context” and of “carrying prohibited weapons in a terrorist context”.
The charges concern a gunbattle in the Belgian capital on March 15, 2016, four months after the Paris attacks, which led to his capture days later. Three police officers were wounded and a fellow jihadist was killed.
Abdeslam and the man arrested with him, Tunisian national Sofiane Ayari, 24, could serve up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
The trial is the prelude to a later one in France and prosecutors hope the Brussels trial will yield clues not only about the attacks that killed 130 people in Paris but also the suicide bombings months later in Brussels.
Abdeslam has refused point-blank to speak to investigators throughout the nearly two years since his arrest, which capped a four-month hunt for Europe’s most wanted man.
But he has insisted on attending the Brussels trial, which is expected to last four days, raising the question of whether he will use it to break his silence.
Belgium’s federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said “it is important for the victims” that the trial yield clues behind the two attacks.
Tight secrecy surrounds the plans for transferring Abdeslam from Paris to the Palais de Justice in Brussels, and then back to a prison just across the border in northern France every night.
French and Belgian forces will take joint responsibility for escorting the defendant from France’s Vendin-le-Vieil prison. He will be taken either by road or by helicopter but a decision will not be made until the last moment.
Security forces are leaving no scenario to chance — escape bids, suicide attempts and even another attack — for the first public appearance of the boyish former bar owner.