Alleged accomplices of 2023 Brussels attacker to face trial

Several people accused of helping Abdesalem Lassoued, who shot dead two Swedish football supporters in Brussels in October 2023, are to appear before a Brussels court, Belgian outlets La Libre and 7sur7 reported. No trial date or the number of defendants has been given.

Lassoued pulled up on a scooter in the Sainctelette district on 16 October 2023 and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon taken from his backpack, hitting a taxi carrying three Swedish fans on their way to a Belgium-Sweden Euro qualifier at the King Baudouin Stadium. The passengers tried to flee into a nearby building, but the gunman chased them and fired again. Two men, one in his sixties, were killed instantly; a third, in his seventies, was seriously wounded but survived after a long hospital stay.

Minutes after the shooting, Lassoued posted a video online claiming the attack and confirming he had targeted Swedes, prompting police to lock down the King Baudouin Stadium, where 35,000 fans became potential targets for the time of the threat. The match was halted at half-time, and supporters were not allowed to leave until after midnight, under police escort.

Police tracked Lassoued overnight after a tip-off placed him in a cafe in Schaerbeek on the morning of 17 October. Officers confronted him there and shot him; he died shortly afterwards.

Lassoued, a 45-year-old Tunisian national living illegally in Belgium, had been flagged by Italian anti-terrorism police years earlier over suspected radicalisation and a wish to join the Islamic State group, and his asylum requests in Norway, Sweden and Italy had all been rejected before he reached Belgium in December 2015. Brussels-North police reported in 2022 that he was giving radical sermons in Schaerbeek, and Tunisia had separately sought his extradition over a 2005 attempted-murder conviction, but the case file sat untouched in a Brussels prosecutor's office for more than a year. A review meeting on his case had even been scheduled for 17 October 2023, the day after the attack.

Belgium's then justice minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, resigned days after the attack over these failures, which he attributed to heavy workloads and a lack of cross-checking between databases.