Once a terrorist, always a terrorist?

In November 2020, he was released from prison, without any real reference points or friends. “In prison, we have nothing. Just dreams”he said. To make matters worse, his childhood had not been easy. Arriving at the age of 3 in Belgium with his father, his mother never wanted him. He went from reception center to reception center and then from psychiatric center to psychiatric center.

Barely free, information reached the police reporting plans for a robbery with a fellow inmate. Wiretaps show he has plans to sell drugs. There is also talk of counterfeit note scams. But there is also a question of contacts with Actiris or the centers which provide psychological follow-up.

The terrorist alert level remains unchanged for the end of year periods: “A high level which means that the threat is possible and probable”

The radical sphere

It was then that information was provided about him by the Moroccan authorities. He is reportedly considering joining the ranks of the Islamic State in the Sahel and has made a video pledging allegiance to ISIS. His case goes to the federal prosecutor’s office, which has jurisdiction over terrorism matters. He was arrested in June 2022. And it appears that his only contacts are in a radical sphere: a man for whom “They are all unbelievers.”two alleged members of the IS who are Libyan and Afghan as well as a jihadist prisoner in the camps where the women of the IS are detained in the northeast of Syria.

He wanted to free this woman with whom he had fallen madly in love and whom he wanted to marry. But he also wanted to marry a Moroccan woman whose brother had joined IS and died in Syria. He had also set his sights on an IS member, mother of two children.

Strasbourg validates forfeitures of Belgian nationality

For the federal prosecutor, these searches for weapons, false documents and his allegiance video which are preparatory acts for an attack. State Security, she recalled, saw in this man “the typical profit of someone who could commit an isolated act”.

But she notes in this man, who remains “impressionable and fragile” a beginning of questioning, especially since after living on the street, he managed to escape. She requested three years in prison but would not oppose a probationary suspension with a very long trial period.

For Mohamed’s lawyer, Me Eliott Vanoeteren, we cannot speak of preparatory acts: we have never found any weapons, the search for false papers is not an act specific to a planned attack and the video is not enough. He pleaded acquittal. Or, failing that, the sentence of independent probation. Judgment on January 20.