The coordinator behind the jihadist terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, in which 132 people were killed, is now being granted prison leave, report Euronews and Le Monde. This is creating anger in both France and Belgium.

Mohamed Bakkali was sentenced in 2022 to 30 years’ imprisonment by a French court for his role in coordinating the deadly attacks in which militant Muslims killed 132 people and injured hundreds more after armed men stormed the Bataclan theatre in Paris and suicide bombers struck throughout the city.

Bakkali, who was extradited to Belgium in 2018, was also sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment in Belgium for his role in planning a new attack on a Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris.

In France, Mohamed Bakkali is a unique case, a symbol of the wave of terror that cast the country into mourning: He is the only jihadist to have been convicted twice for his involvement in two different attacks.

Under French law, he cannot in theory be released before 2035. But in Belgium he benefits from a significantly more favourable system.

Belgian prosecutors informed Agence France-Presse that a court in Brussels had decided that Bakkali could temporarily be allowed to leave Ittre Prison, a high-security prison that opened in 2002.

The Brussels public prosecutor’s office stated that the court had made the decision “despite the opposition of the prosecution”, adding that “the prosecution has no right of appeal, and the decision is therefore final”. “It is up to the prison governor to implement it,” it said.

Le Monde reported that the prison leaves are a preliminary step towards a potential granting of conditional release under electronic monitoring.

The decision, which allows Bakkali to leave prison six times for 36 hours on each occasion, has triggered strong reactions in both Belgium and France.

“His prison leaves and his possible forthcoming release after serving one third of the sentence are a slap in the face to the victims, the investigators and justice in the democracies,” wrote Thibault de Montbrial, a French lawyer and president of the Center for Reflection on Internal Security, on X.

Matthieu Valet, a member of the European Parliament from the French party Rassemblement National, said that it was like giving the finger “to French justice and the victims”. “Those who participate in these networks must serve their entire sentence without privileges,” he said.

In Belgium, Denis Ducarme, a member of parliament from the Reformist Movement, compared the decision to “turning one’s back on the memory of the victims and the suffering of the families”. “What a country. What a disgrace,” he added.

Vlaams Belang MP Alexander van Hoecke said that his party would now put forward a legislative proposal to ensure that “convicted terrorists are no longer entitled to release or prison leave”.

Belgian Minister of Justice Annelies Verlinden said that the decision to allow Bakkali to leave prison had been made following “a thorough review of the case” and under “very strict conditions”.

Verlinden added that Bakkali had previously been allowed to leave prison, but for shorter periods.

Frankrike: 10 år etter Bataclan-massakren øker den islamske terrortrusselen igjen

Bataclan-overlevende: – Frankrike gjorde ikke alt for å unngå terror

Of the coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State (IS) in the Paris region on 13 November 2015, the bloodiest attack took place inside the Bataclan theatre and concert hall. Ninety people were killed at this location alone, many of them in extremely brutal ways, involving torture and mutilation.

Even experienced police officers were horrified by what they witnessed there, and one of them described the crime scene as a war zone.

The jihadists also gouged out the eyes and cut open the genitals of some of the victims, according to witness testimony in an outrageous French report.

Some of the victims’ bodies from the theatre’s second floor had been decapitated or otherwise mutilated, according to two witness accounts reported to a parliamentary commission established to investigate the attack.

The head of the investigation, the conservative politician Georges Fenech, complained to the commission that details about the mutilations had been kept hidden from the families and the press.

He also said that he had heard of one particularly gruesome incident: The father of one of the victims had told him that his son had been cut open and castrated, and that his testicles had been found in his mouth. “They had cut off his testicles,” Fenech said during the testimony.

French police authorities who also testified before the investigators, however, claimed that there was no evidence that the victims’ injuries had been caused by anything other than gunshots and shrapnel.

One official, Michel Cadot, the police prefect of Paris, stressed that no knives had been found at the crime scene.

“Some of the bodies found at Bataclan were extremely mutilated by the explosions and the weapons, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to reconstruct the mutilated bodies,” said investigator Christian Saint.

But Fenech stood by his explanation. “Someone put his testicles in his mouth,” he said.

The allegations of torture emerged during around 200 hours of testimony before an investigative commission in the French National Assembly.

The investigation uncovered a lack of coordination between European intelligence services, which failed to prevent the coordinated terrorist attacks.

“The bodies have not been shown to the families, because these are persons who are decapitated, persons who are swollen and persons who have been dismembered,” a police witness told the authorities, according to the transcript.

When Fenech asked whether the mutilations could have been filmed by the terrorists, the witness replied: “It seems so to me”.

“There are people who are decapitated, swollen and cut open. There are signs of sexual assaults against women and stab wounds to the genitals. If I am not mistaken, the eyes of some of the victims have been removed,” the witness stated.

The witness was afterwards asked by Fenech how he had become aware of these barbaric acts. He replied that he himself had only seen bodies struck by bullets, on the ground floor.

But he learned the gruesome details from another investigator, whom he found crying after having seen the bloodbath upstairs.

“After the attack, we were together with our colleagues in the Saint-Pierre-Amelot corridor when I saw an investigator come out in tears and on the verge of vomiting,” said the police witness.