Jewish Museum Of Belgium Shooter Charged With Terror-Linked Murder Of 4 People In May

The Belgian prosecutor’s office has charged a Frenchman suspected of being the shooter in a fatal attack in May at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels with “murder in a terrorist context” on Wednesday, a report by Agence France-Presse said.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, was extradited from France to Belgium on Tuesday to be questioned over the fatal shootings on May 24, which left four people dead. Nemmouche had reportedly spent more than a year fighting with Islamist fighters in Syria.

A statement released from the prosecutor’s office reportedly said that, “Since his arrival he has been interrogated by the counter-terrorist unit of the federal judiciary police of Brussels, as well as by the investigating judge.” Nemmouche remained largely silent during the course of his interrogation, Belgian media said in the report.

Nemmouche, a French national of Algerian descent, was interrogated by Belgian police over the killings of a Jewish couple, a Frenchwoman and a Belgian man, who were killed when a gunman opened fire at the museum in downtown Brussels in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.

The shootings in Brussels brought back fears of a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence in Europe, as well as fears of terror attacks by Islamist fighters returning to Europe from Syria.

Nemmouche was arrested in the port city of Marseille, in southern France, where he was spotted on a bus coming from Brussels. A search of his bags revealed a revolver and a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, which resembled the weapons used in the shootings that were caught on a museum security camera as well as on a portable camera, the report said.