Prosecutors demand life sentence for Brussels Jewish museum killer

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Prosecutors demand that a French jihadist found guilty of shooting dead four people in a terrorist attack at Brussels’ Jewish museum in 2014 be jailed for life.

A jury last week convicted 33-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche of “terrorist murder” for the anti-Semitic gun rampage in the Belgian capital on May 24, 2014, a crime committed following his return from Syria’s battlefields.

“What we ask, without the slightest hesitation, is that you sentence Mehdi Nemmouche to life in prison,” prosecutor Yves Moreau tells a Brussels court, condemning him as “cowardly” and a “psychopath.”

“Mr. Nemmouche, you are just a coward, you kill people by shooting them from behind, you kill old women by shooting them with an assault rifle, you kill because it gives you pleasure to kill,” Moreau says.

After closing statements from prosecution and defense lawyers, the 12 jurors and three judges will retire again on Monday to consider sentence, with an announcement expected by the evening.

Nemmouche was found to have killed the four victims in less than 90 seconds, coldly shooting them with a handgun and a Kalashnikov rifle with what one paramedic who attended the scene called “surgical” precision.

Prosecutors also demanded a minimum 30-year prison sentence for Nacer Bendrer, 30, who was found guilty of being the co-author of the attack because he supplied the weapons Nemmouche used.

— AFP