On the afternoon of 24 May 2014, a gunman opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people in an antisemitic Islamist terrorist attack. 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.
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