Swedish national Osama Krayem is set to be put on trial for his role in the 2016 Brussels terror attacks where he was captured when his suicide vest failed to detonate.
The trial for the 26-year-old is expected to begin next year in Belgium, some four years after the attack occurred with Belgian Minister of Justice Koen Geens claiming that the exact dates are set to be announced in the autumn, Expressen reports.
His family originally from Syria, Krayem grew up in the notorious “no-go area” of Rosengård in the heavily migrant-populated Swedish city of Malmö and joined Islamic State in 2014.
After being described by Expressen as “gaining a prominent role” within the terror group, Krayem returned to Europe from Syria where he became part of a French-Belgian terrorist cell that planned and carried out the Paris Bataclan massacre in 2015.
Following the Brussels attacks, which occurred at Zaventem Airport and the Maelbeek metro station and saw 35 dead including three of the attackers, Krayem was arrested after being caught on CCTV interacting with terrorist Khalid el-Bakraoui whose bomb exploded at the Maelbeek metro station.
Krayem told his assistant attorney, who was later replaced, that the vest had simply failed to detonate but later told police he did not pull the trigger at all saying: “I knew what I was doing. But I regretted it at the last minute.”
The trial is set to be held at the former NATO headquarters in Brussels and will involve 12 defendants in total and is expected to take around six to eight months to complete.
The trial comes after the conviction of another member of the Franco-Belgian terror cell and sole survivor of the Bataclan attack, Salah Abdeslam, who was sentenced to 20 years in a Belgian court for attempted murder during a raid in 2016 that led to his arrest.
Last year, captured French Islamic State member Jonathan Geffroy claimed that the Franco-Belgian cell had originally wanted to target a French nuclear power plant rather than the Brussels metro and airport, which he alleged were in response to the arrest of Abdeslam.