Brussels Museum Shooting Suspect Fights Extradition to Belgium
The French man suspected of having shot three people dead in the Jewish Museum in Brussels last month refused on Wednesday to be extradited from France to Belgium, prosecutors and his lawyer said.
Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, who has been in police custody since his arrest on Friday in the southern city of Marseille, refused to leave France when presented with a European arrest warrant during a court hearing in Versailles outside Paris.
The suspect has another court appearance on Thursday. If he refuses extradition again, he can appeal the prosecutor’s demand to a higher court, but this would likely only delay rather than block his transfer to Brussels, legal sources said.
Prosecutors say the repeat-offender, who they say spent most of 2013 fighting in Syria with Islamist rebels, is being held under anti-terror laws on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and possession of weapons in relation to the May 24 attack.
“We would like him to be judged under French jurisdiction,” Nemmouche’s lawyer, Apolin Pepiezep, told iTele. “Nothing today proves that Mehdi Nemmouche is the culprit.”
The EU-wide system of arrest warrants, in effect since 2004, is designed to ensure faster and simpler extraditions. The European Commission says an extradition within EU member states takes on average 48 days if the suspect does not agree to it.
An Israeli couple and a French woman were killed in the attack in the Jewish Museum in the Belgian capital by a man who opened fire with a Kalashnikov.
When arrested at a Marseille bus terminal, Nemmouche was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, another gun and ammunition similar to that used in the shooting, prosecutors said. His lawyer said Nemmouche told police he had stolen them from a car in Brussels.
Nemmouche, who comes from Roubaix near the Belgian border, has already served five different sentences in French jails, where he became a radical Islamist, prosecutors have said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
