Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Brussels Shooting Suspect Identified as Islamist Captor in Syria

The Frenchman suspected of killing four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium has been identified as one of the Islamists who held a French journalist captive in Syria.

French journalist Nicolas Henin told reporters at a news conference on Saturday that Mehdi Nemmouche was for six months one of his captors, and that he mistreated his prisoners. Henin called Nemmouche “violent and provocative.”

Henin said he recognized Nemmouche from video and audio recordings after Nemmouche was arrested in the Brussels shooting.

Henin said he was held for a time during his captivity that ended in April 2013 with American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were killed by an ISIS member who beheaded him on camera and released the videos.

“When Nemmouche was not singing, he was torturing. He was part of a small group of Frenchmen whose visits would terrify the 50-odd Syrian prisoners held in the cells nearby,” Henin told the French magazine LePoint, which broke the story on Saturday. “Every night the blows would start raining down in the room, where I was also interrogated. The torture lasted all night, until dawn prayers.”

Nemmouche has been in police custody on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and possession of weapons since his arrest on May 30 in the southern French city of Marseille.

French police said June 1 that they believed Nemmouche committed the May 24 murders at the Jewish Museum of Belgium and then traveled to Marseille on a bus. He was arrested at a routine customs inspection of the passengers on the bus, which left from Amsterdam via Brussels to France.

Four people were killed in the attack at the museum, including two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer at the museum and a Belgian employee.

Nemmouche, who lived in the French city of Roubaix on the border with Belgium, had spent several years in a French jail for armed robbery. French authorities believe he left for Syria via Belgium to fight with jihadists in 2012 before returning to Europe.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.