Bombers sentenced to murder in Brussels airport 2016 bombing trial
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A court in Brussels has found six men guilty of terrorist murder, more than seven years after the suicide bomb attacks which killed 32 people at the city's airport and a metro station in March 2016, reports the BBC. ä
After a long trial and 19 days of jury deliberations, the court in Brussels returned their verdicts.
Several of those on trial had already been convicted of taking part in the Paris terror attacks months earlier.
One of those convicted for planning the Brussels airport bombings was arrested days before the Brussels bombings: He was found guilty in France last year of the November 2015 Paris bomb and gun attacks in which 130 died.
Another of those now found guilty of both bombings was identified on CCTV fleeing Zaventem airport when his explosives did not ignite.
32 killed initially - three more victims died years later
Two bombs exploded just before 08:00 am at opposite ends of the departures hall at Zaventem airport, killing 16 people.
Just an hour later, another explosion occured on a train at Maelbeek metro station in Brussels' European quarter, close to EU institutions. 16 people died in the train bombing and hundreds more were wounded.
The court ruled that three more people should also be considered victims of the attacks, bringing the death toll to 35. Those people died in the years following the bombing, and according to the ruling, due to the incident:
They included a 23 year old woman who suffered many years of psychological illness before she died by euthanasia last year.
Another man died of cancer in 2017 after treatments were stopped due to injuries caused by the metro bombing.
A third person suffered post traumatic stress after the incident and took his own life in 2021.
Background from Wikipedia:
On 22 March 2016, two coordinated terrorist attacks in Brussels, Belgium, were carried out by the Islamic State (IS). Two suicide bombers detonated bombs at Brussels Airport in Zaventem, and one detonated a bomb on a train leaving Maalbeek/Maelbeek metro station in central Brussels.
32 people were killed and more than 300 were injured. Three perpetrators also died. A third airport attacker fled the scene without detonating his bomb, which was later found in a search of the airport. A second metro attacker also fled, taking his bomb with him. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks.