A Belgian policeman has traced the route of the alleged brain of the attacks. An embarrassing file for the Belgian authorities and that put the witness in difficulty.
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“We do not have the ability to rewrite the story.” By opening his remarks from Brussels, from where he deposits videoconference, the witness of the day already anticipates the rain of questions that will soon fall on him. This investigator of the Belgian federal police inherited a thorny file, this Thursday, December 2: to trace before the Paris Special Assize Court The Belgian terrorist route Osama Atar, the alleged sponsor of the 13-November attacks, given For death in Syria in 2017 and judged in the absence of this trial. A path surrounded by areas of shadow and bulky assumptions for the authorities of his country.
For his testimony, the police officer has planned to stick to the synthetic reading of a new Belgian record of 300 pages transmitted – “a little late”, points out the parquet – to the French justice in June 2021, after the closing of the judicial information. “We did not wait for the release of a book to write a ultimate PV on Atar”, feels obliged to specify the investigator. The “book” in question, published in September by a Belgian deputy, argues that the Belgian services would have tried to recruit Oussama Atar as informant, which would have facilitated his departure in Syria. Failing to “rewrite” history, defense lawyers like those of the civil parties would like to understand.
The witness launches: “To understand Oussama Atar’s involvement in the bets of Paris, you have to go up a little bit in time.” Twelve years earlier, to be precise.
In September 2003, the young Brussels puts an end to brief chemistry studies and flies on Syria. He is 19 years old. “According to French internal security,” says the Belgian policeman, meaning that he does not have first-hand information on this file too big for him, atar would have met during his Arabic courses in Damascus “students in Contact with Iraqi insurgents “.
” Save Oussama “
On February 24, 2005, the young Belgian is arrested by the US military in northern Iraq. “According to Interpol’s information,” says the Belgian policeman, he was injured in the leg and considered a member of a group related to Al-Qaida.
His name appears in an unavoidable file in Iraq by the US military, where it is described as a “veteran” of the battle of Fallouja, and which details its “skills”: “Raids, small arms, French language and Arabic “. On his sheet appears another name: “Abu Mohammed al-Adnani”, which will become a few years later the number two of the Islamic State Organization (EI) and will validate the project of the attacks of 13-November.
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