2014 terrorist attack in Brussels, Belgium
The Jewish Museum of Belgium shooting was an antisemitic Islamist terrorist attack which took place in Brussels, Belgium, on 24 May 2014 when a gunman opened fire at the museum, killing four people. Three of them, an Israeli couple on holiday and a French woman, died at the scene. The fourth victim, a Belgian employee of the museum, later died of his injuries in hospital. Six days after the attack, on 30 May 2014, Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian origin, was arrested during a routine drugs check in Marseille, France, when he was found to be carrying weapons identical to those used in the shooting. A second suspect, Nacer Bendrer, was later identified and arrested.
Nemmouche had previously spent time in French prisons, where he embraced Islamic extremism. Upon his release, he spent more than a year in Syria. It was in prison that he met Bendrer, who supplied him with the weapons used in the attack. Investigators identified a third suspect, but charges against him were dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence. 
Nemmouche and Bendrer were formally indicted in April 2018, and tried before the court of assizes of Brussels in early 2019. After two months of hearings, Nemmouche was found guilty of four terrorist murders, whilst Bendrer was found guilty of being an accomplice by supplying Nemmouche with weapons.The theory that Nemmouche was framed by foreign intelligence officials, put forward by his defence, was rejected. Nemmouche was sentenced to life imprisonment whilst Bendrer was sentenced to 15 years. Both were later also sentenced to pay close to one million euro in damages to the victims' next of kin. This was the first attack committed by the Islamic State in Europe.
Shooting.
On the afternoon of 24 May 2014, Nemmouche walked up to the Jewish Museum of Belgium in the Sablon/Zavel district in central Brussels carrying a handgun. He shot an Israeli couple in the entrance to the museum and then approached the reception desk, where he shot a Belgian employee of the museum. He next took an assault rifle out of a bag to shoot a French female volunteer at her desk in a nearby room, after which he fled the scene on foot and disappeared into the crowd. The attack, which lasted less than ninety seconds, was captured on the museum's security cameras. The Israeli couple and the French volunteer died instantly, while the Belgian employee was critically injured and died nearly two weeks later in hospital. According to security camera footage, the attacker appeared to wear a chest-mounted camera, like Mohammed Merah, who filmed his acts during the 2012 Toulouse and Montauban shootings, although the camera failed during filming.
The Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Didier Reynders, was in the vicinity of the museum and heard the gunshots. The Minister of the Interior, Joëlle Milquet, was also nearby and arrived on the scene a few minutes later.
Victims.
Four people were killed in the shooting: Emmanuel and Miriam Riva, a middle-aged Israeli couple on holiday from Tel Aviv who were visiting the museum; Dominique Sabrier, a French museum volunteer in her sixties; Alexandre Strens, a Belgian employee of the museum in his twenties. The first three victims died instantly, while the fourth died nearly two weeks later in hospital, having never regained consciousness after being shot in the head.
Emmanuel and Miriam Riva were buried in Tel Aviv on 27 May 2014, with the Belgian ambassador to Israel attending the ceremony. Alexandre Strens, who was born in Morocco to a Jewish mother and Algerian Berber father, was buried in a Muslim cemetery in Taza, Morocco on 10 June 2014.
Investigation.
A nationwide manhunt was launched for the attacker. Belgian police appealed to the public to help identify him, releasing CCTV from the museum which showed his image, partly obscured. The police described him as being of medium height and athletic build, and wearing a dark baseball cap. A man who was seen driving from the museum was detained, but released after questioning, and remained a witness in the investigation. On the day after the attack, deputy prosecutor Ine Van Wymersch said the shooter "probably acted alone, was armed and well prepared" and stated that the motive for the attack was still open. The following day, it was announced that the attack was being investigated as a terrorist incident.
Perpetrator.
Mehdi Nemmouche (; born 17 April 1985), a 29-year-old French citizen, was arrested on 30 May 2014 at the Saint-Charles railway/bus station in Marseille during a random drugs search when he got off a coach arriving from Amsterdam via Brussels. He was found to be carrying two weapons identical to those used in the attack, a white sheet bearing ISIS insignia, and a video with an ISIS flag in which he claimed responsibility for the killings.
Nemmouche was born in Roubaix, a French town near the Belgian border. He was taken into care at the age of three months following neglect by his single mother and placed with a foster family. At the age of sixteen, by which time he already had a criminal record, he was moved to a group home in Paris. At the age of seventeen he went to live with his Algerian grandmother in Tourcoing. Between 2007 and 2012 he spent five years in various prisons in the south of France after being convicted of robbery. Nemmouche became radicalized in prison and left for Syria in December 2012, soon after his release. Once in Syria, he joined the ranks of ISIS and became one of the jailors of French hostages. He was the first European to commit an attack upon returning from Syria.
Nemmouche initially contested his extradition to Belgium under a European arrest warrant. He dropped his appeal against extradition after guarantees that Belgium would not transfer him to Israel and was returned to Belgium at the end of July 2014, two months after his arrest.
Analysis of a telephone call made by Abdelhamid Abaaoud established that he was in contact with Nemmouche during January 2014. Abaaoud was the ringleader of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris that occurred on 13 November 2015.
Indictment.
The Belgian federal prosecutor's office, which was responsible for the investigation, requested the "council chamber" of the tribunal of first instance of Brussels to start indictment proceedings for Nemmouche and Bendrer at the end of 2017. The federal prosecutor's office also requested that the charges against a third suspect, a friend of Bendrer who had been implicated, be dismissed. On 25 January 2018, the council chamber ruled on the requests: Nemmouche and Bendrer were referred to the "chamber of indictment" of the court of appeal of Brussels, but so was the third suspect. Despite the request of the federal prosecutor's office, the charges against the latter were thus not dismissed.
On 19 April 2018, the chamber of indictment ruled on the issue: Nemmouche and Bendrer were formally indicted, but contrary to the council chamber the chamber of indictment considered the evidence against the third suspect to be too weak. The third suspect was thus not indicted and the charges against him dismissed. This meant that only Nemmouche and Bendrer would stand trial for the terrorist attack before the court of assizes.
Court trial.
Hearings.
Preliminary proceedings.
In January 2019, the trial of Mehdi Nemmouche and Nacer Bendrer, who was accused of being an accomplice, started before the court of assizes of Brussels. In the Belgian criminal justice system, a court of assizes holds jury trials for the most serious crimes. It is a non-permanent court that is only composed once a case has been referred to it by means of an indictment. A few weeks before the actual start of the trial, a preliminary hearing took place on 20 December 2018, during which a list of about 120 witnesses, which were to be heard in the case, was decided on. A request by Nemmouche's defence attorneys to adjourn the case was refused.
On 7 January 2019, three days before the start of the actual trial, the members of the jury were selected. For the jury selection, 200 Belgian citizens were summoned to the Palace of Justice of Brussels, where the trial was held. After a dozen of prospective jurors were challenged by both the defence and the prosecution, eight men and four women were eventually empaneled as jurors. An additional twelve people were also selected as alternate jurors.
Accusation.
On 10 January 2019, the actual trial started with the prosecution reading the 195-page "act of accusation" to the court and jury, wherein it described the charges brought against the two men and the evidence gathered during the investigation. On 15 January, the defence attorneys of Nemmouche, amongst which Henri Laquay and Sebastien Courtoy, presented their "act of defence" in turn, in which they listed seven main arguments against the charges. They focused on the perceived lack of DNA traces on some of the material evidence, and accused the Mossad (foreign intelligence agency of Israel) of having set up Nemmouche. According to the defence, the Riva couple that were killed in the shooting were not tourists, but members of the Mossad. They also accused the Belgian investigators of being complicit and having doctored the evidence to frame Nemmouche. After the presentation of the defence, the presiding judge questioned both accused. Nemmouche admitted to being in the possession of the weapons, but denied having committed the attack. He refused to answer any further questions. Bendrer in turn answered the questions of the judge. He admitted Nemmouche asked to provide him with weapons, but denied having done so.
Testimonies.
Over the next weeks, the court heard the testimonies of the firsthand witnesses, first responders, investigators, experts, and family members of both the victims and the accused. An important testimony was that of two French journalists, Didier François and Nicolas Hénin, who had been held hostage from 2013 to 2014 in Syria by ISIS operatives. They testified that Nemmouche, under the alias "Abu Omar", was one of their guards and torturers, and described him as being "sadistic, playful and narcissistic". The former director of the prison in Salon-de-Provence, France, in which both accused had been incarcerated in the past, testified that Nemmouche had radicalised during his prison stay. There was disagreement whether Bendrer also adhered to radical Islamic beliefs at the time. During the hearings, the investigators also rejected the assertion that the Riva couple were intelligence officers for the Mossad, as did attorneys of the Riva couple's family. Whilst the wife, Miriam Riva, did work for the Mossad until her retirement, she did so as an accountant and never came into contact with any intelligence operations, they stated.
A few incidents occurred during the trial hearings as well. Specifically, some jurors had to be replaced by alternate jurors for various reasons, such as illness or speaking out of court. In addition, on 29 January 2019, a dossier related to the case was stolen from the office of an attorney for one of the civil parties. The theft did not have an impact on the trial though.
Closing arguments.
After all witnesses were heard, closing arguments were presented by all parties starting from 18 February 2019. First the attorneys for the "civil parties" (aggrieved parties seeking compensation, such as the victims' families) presented their arguments, and the following week the prosecution and defence did so too. According to the prosecution, it was clear that Nemmouche was the perpetrator of the attack. Bendrer on the other hand was not aware of what Nemmouche was going to do with the weapons he supplied, according to the prosecution, and should therefor not be found guilty of being a co-author but rather of being an accomplice in the attack (i.e. Bendrer's help was not indispensable in committing the attack). The defence of Nemmouche in turn brought up a number of arguments that in their view would prove Nemmouche was not the perpetrator, but rather the victim of an elaborate set-up. Amongst other things, they mentioned a lack of footage from security cameras other than those of the museum, accused the two French journalists who testified during the trial of lying, and suggested Nemmouche's DNA material was planted at the scene after the attack. According to the defence, Nemmouche was recruited by Iranian and Lebanese security services after being released from prison in 2012, and went to Syria to infiltrate ISIS on their