Eighty-Two Seconds

At 3:50 on a Saturday afternoon in May 2014, a man entered the Jewish Museum of Belgium on the Rue Montagne de la Cour in Brussels. He was carrying two bags. He had a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun. In eighty-two seconds, he shot and killed four people.

He then walked out of the building, turned left, and disappeared.

It took Belgian and French authorities nine days to find him. It took four more years for the trial to begin. What emerged in the Assizes Court of Brussels was not just the account of a single atrocity but the first full legal examination of what it meant for a European citizen to travel to Syria, join the Islamic State, and return home to kill.

The attack

The four victims were: Miriam Riva, 24, an Israeli tourist; Emanuel Riva, 53, her husband and a former employee of Mossad; Alexandre Strens, 25, a Belgian museum employee; and Dominique Sabrier, 66, a French volunteer at the museum. Strens and Sabrier died at the scene. The Rivas died in hospital in the hours that followed.

The attack was captured on the museum's internal CCTV system, which is why the duration of eighty-two seconds is known with precision. The footage showed the attacker entering with deliberate purpose, opening fire within seconds of crossing the threshold, and leaving without hesitation. He did not speak. He did not pause. The attack had been planned.

Belgium's federal prosecutor opened a terrorism investigation immediately. The country's State Security Service — the VSSE — had, it later emerged, been tracking a number of Belgian nationals who had traveled to Syria since the beginning of the civil war in 2011. The name Mehdi Nemmouche was not unfamiliar to them.

Nemmouche: biography of a radicalization

Mehdi Nemmouche was born in Roubaix, northern France, in 1987, to parents of Algerian origin. He was raised partly in foster care after a difficult early childhood. His criminal record in France began in his teens and included convictions for robbery, fraud, and other offences that resulted in multiple prison sentences.

It was during one of those sentences, according to prosecutors and the later trial evidence, that he radicalized. By 2011, he was attending a mosque in Roubaix that had come to the attention of French intelligence for connections to networks facilitating travel to conflict zones. In January 2013, he flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria.

In Syria, Nemmouche joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — at that point still consolidating control of territory in the country's east and north. He rose, according to testimony at his trial, to a position that involved direct oversight of Western hostages being held by the group.

The hostages who testified

This is where the Brussels trial became something more than a standard terrorism prosecution. Among those called to give evidence were former French and Spanish journalists who had been held by the Islamic State and subsequently released — in some cases just weeks before the museum attack.

Their testimony was extraordinary. They described a man who ran the prison block in which they were held, who was known to them by a nom de guerre, and who participated directly in the abuse, torture, and psychological torment of hostages. Several identified him from photographs. One described him walking through the cell block singing Michael Jackson songs.

Nemmouche had been present during the captivity of journalists including Nicolas Hénin and Didier François of France and Marc Marginedas of Spain — men who had later been freed and were now sitting in a Belgian courtroom looking at the man they said had tortured them. James Foley, the American journalist who was later beheaded by the Islamic State, had also been held during overlapping periods. He did not survive to testify.

The hostage testimony linked Nemmouche not merely to the museum attack but to the broader horror of the IS captivity apparatus — and raised the question of what European intelligence services had known, and when.

The 37-day gap

Nemmouche had returned to Europe from Syria in late 2013. He spent time in Frankfurt and in Amsterdam. He entered Belgium. He was not stopped.

The trial established that the VSSE had received information from a partner intelligence service flagging Nemmouche as a returned foreign fighter who potentially posed a threat. The information arrived thirty-seven days before the museum attack. It was processed. A file was opened. No action was taken in time.

The gap became one of the most examined failures in Belgian security history, and its examination in court led directly to subsequent reforms in how the country shared and acted on intelligence about returning fighters. In the years after the Brussels attack, Belgium would have cause to revisit these failures repeatedly: the country produced more foreign fighters per capita than almost any other Western European nation, and the intelligence structures built in the aftermath of the museum shooting were tested severely in the November 2015 Paris attacks and the March 2016 Brussels bombings.

The verdict

Mehdi Nemmouche was convicted on all counts in March 2019. The jury, deliberating in the Assizes Court, found him guilty of four murders with a terrorist motive. He was sentenced to life imprisonment — the maximum term available under Belgian law.

His accomplice, Nacer Bendrer, who had supplied weapons used in the attack, was convicted of participation in a terrorist act and sentenced to fifteen years.

Nemmouche showed no reaction as the verdict was read. He had maintained throughout the trial that he was not the man in the footage, despite witness identifications, DNA evidence, and the recovery of weapons and a GoPro camera — found in his possession when he was arrested on a bus from Amsterdam — on which a partial recording of the attack had been made.

He appealed. The conviction was upheld.

What the trial established

The Nemmouche case was the first European trial to examine the full circuit of IS-related terrorism: radicalization in prison, travel to Syria, active participation in the Islamic State's captivity and torture program, return to Europe, and a domestic attack. Every phase was documented in court through witness testimony, surveillance records, and physical evidence.

It established a legal and factual framework that Belgian, French, and international prosecutors would draw on in the trials that followed — trials arising from attacks in which the scale of casualties dwarfed what happened at the Jewish Museum, but in which the pattern of radicalization, travel, and return was often strikingly similar.

The museum on the Rue Montagne de la Cour reopened. A memorial to the four victims stands inside. Eighty-two seconds is, depending on how you count it, a very short time or a very long one.

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This story is covered in full on Courtside Europe, Episode 1. Listen to the episode here.