From Pravda, with thanks to Nicolei.
A Brussels judge on Monday sent over a dozen people to trial on charges of aiding and abetting terrorists, including those suspected in last year’s Madrid train bombings.
An autumn trial would be the first test for a 2004 law making it a crime to consort with terrorists.
Prosecutors accused 13 defendants of membership in the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain, an anti-Western group formed by veterans of the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviet Union.
In addition to linking the GICM to the Madrid blasts, they alleged the group’s members had a hand in the May 16, 2003 bombings in Casablanca that killed nearly 50 people.
Four other defendants were named in court but they are in foreign jails, including three in Spain linked with the Madrid trains attacks that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,500 on March 11, 2004.
At least three defendants of the 13 suspects were born and raised in Maaseik, a town of 24,000 on Belgium’s eastern border with the Netherlands. One, Khalid Bouloudo, 30, is alleged to be the Belgian coordinator of the GICM…
In Maaseik, Bouloudo and his Muslim friends were known to Mayor Jan Creemers.
Creemers told the AP, that a few years ago, six Muslim women in his town suddenly showed up in public completely covered in bhurkas.
“I didn’t understand that,” Creemers said.
“Born and raised here! That scared many people” in Maaseik, whose Muslim population totals under 800, Creemers said…