A Brussels court on Tuesday found six of the 10 suspects guilty of terrorist murder for their role in the 2016 terror attacks which left initially 32 dead and injured hundreds in the Belgian capital.

According to the Belgian news agency Belga, three suspects in the attacks were acquitted of that charge. The sentences will be decided in September.

A 10th suspect is believed to have died in Syria.

According to Belga, the jury also decided to hold the six convicted defendants accountable for the deaths of three additional people who died after the attacks, either after a long illness or by suicide.

That brings the official death toll to 35, the agency said.

Apart from terrorist murder, the 10 defendants were charged with attempted terrorist murder and participation in a terrorist organization.

The suicide bombings carried out on March 22, 2016 targeted the city’s airport and a metro station. They took place at a time when Europe was on edge due to previous terrorist attacks.

Six of the nine defendants put on trial for the Brussels attack already received long prison sentences from a French court for their roles in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris in which 130 people were killed.

Tuesday’s ruling was handed down after a jury of 12 deliberated for over two weeks.

The most prominent defendant is Salah Abdeslam, who was on the run for months following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.

He was previously sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court as well as to 20 years in jail in a separate trial for having shot at police shortly before his 2016 arrest in Brussels.

Mohamed Abrini, also already sentenced for life imprisonment in Paris, is in court in Belgium after having travelled to the airport in Brussels together with one of the suicide bombers, where he abandoned his explosives.

Oussama Atar, who is considered the leading figure of the terrorist network behind the attacks, was again tried in absentia. He is believed to have died in Syria.

Three others suspects have previously been sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison for their role in the Paris terror attacks.

Tuesday’s verdicts brings a painful chapter of Belgian history closer to an end.

Several of the accused had been surveilled by Belgian authorities ahead of the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, but authorities failed to prevent the attacks, Belgian media reported.

The suspects faced more than 900 civil plaintiffs, including survivors with lasting physical and psychological injuries, the bereaved relatives of those killed and first responders.

In recent years, victims and victims’ organizations have repeatedly complained about insufficient and cumbersome support offered by the state.

The trial, which lasted nine months, posed a major challenge to Belgium’s judicial system, which is plagued by chronic understaffing and a lack of resources, news agency Belga reported.

When Moroccan-born former boxer Mohamed Idrissi orders a young man out of his gym for smoking, the respect is tangible.

The youngster stubs out his cigarette and leaves, head bowed. Inside the gym, the muted thud of leather gloves striking punchbags resumes.

Idrissi’s influence goes beyond his job as a coach at the Brussels Boxing Academy, near the Molenbeek district of the Belgian capital where Islamist militants, several of them of Moroccan origin, planned last year’s deadly Paris attacks.

He also has an informal role mentoring youths facing what Reuters interviews with local officials, social workers and residents of Molenbeek suggest is a growing feeling of alienation and increasingly tense relations with police.

Building trust in communities such as Molenbeek is seen by police as vital for gathering intelligence and countering the threat of Islamic State, and respected local figures like Idrissi have a part to play.

“Boxing is a philosophy which I tell them to apply in life,” Idrissi said of his young boxers at the gym in a primary school in central Brussels, across an industrial-era canal from the halal shops, tea parlours and mosques of Molenbeek.

“I tell them: ‘You have to fight to be Belgian’,” said the 34-year-old, who deserted from the Moroccan military police a decade ago while taking part in a boxing competition.

Since the Nov. 13 bloodshed in Paris, security has been tightened in Molenbeek, a district described by its own mayor as a “breeding ground” for violence, and many Muslims say they feel stigmatised.

Idrissi is angered by frequent police checks of people with Moroccan roots which he sees as racial profiling although police deny this. But he bites his tongue in the presence of young men to avoid repeating “the kind of comments we warn parents can feed into their radicalisation.”

Some parents, he says, have turned to him to talk their sons out of plans to join Islamist militants in Syria. Police also visited the gym this year as part of a programme to improve their image with youngsters.

At least five men who trained there have travelled to Syria. One, Ayoub Bazarouj, was detained in December on suspicion of having links to the Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed. He was released in January without charge.

Another, Ahmed Dahmani, was arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of scouting out sites for the militant strikes. Police released a photograph of Dahmani at the gym, holding his fists up as if ready to throw a punch at the camera. Belgium asked for his extradition from Turkey earlier this year.

Idrissi declined comment when asked about his interaction with police over some of his young charges going to Syria.

“LATENT ISLAMOPHOBIA”

A failure to stop the militant cell behind the Paris attacks from carrying out more bombings — 32 people were killed in bombings on the Brussels metro and at the city’s international airport on March 22 — has highlighted the police lack of knowledge of Molenbeek and their few ties with its residents.

The police are also hard pressed to overcome the fear of IS that discourages possible informants. One resident, Hawa Keita, has received death threats since informing on the network that enticed her son to Syria and says: “We live in fear.”

Having eyes on the ground is vital for plugging the intelligence gaps, many officers say.

“It’s not enough to bug phones: you need to know what you are listening for,” Andre Jacob, a former head of Belgium’s State Security agency, the Surete de l’Etat.

As in similar communities across Europe, Belgian police are struggling to build bridges with young Muslims at the same time as they hunt for militants. They have carried out dozens of raids and arrests in Belgium in recent months.

The Interfederal Centre for Equal Opportunities (UNIA), an advocacy group which also works with police on rights issues, says the number of calls to its hot lines complaining about alleged abuse by police has jumped since the Paris attacks.

Its director, Patrick Charlier, witnessed what he called latent Islamophobia in workshops his organisation conducted with police before the Paris attacks. Such sentiment, he suggests, is now out in the open.

“We all of a sudden had a number of cases (of complaints against police),” Charlier said, but declined to give figures, saying it was too soon to assess.

Residents in Molenbeek are angered by some of the comments made about the Muslim population in Belgium, including the interior minister’s suggestion that many Muslims danced in celebration after the Brussels bombings.

“Being rejected, relegated to trash schools, it’s not surprising it ends in bombs,” said 48-year-old Milodi Rahma. “We are doubly victimised: victims of IS and of Islamophobia.”

“US AND THEM”

Belgium has announced a 39-million-euro ($44 million) plan to improve police coordination in Brussels, including boosting staff in Molenbeek for the first time in two decades. The district now has an eight-person unit, whose task is to prevent radicalisation.

But tight budgets means police can end up wearing two hats.

“One day they’re taking part in a big violent raid and the next they’re supposed to go out and chat,” said Vincent Gilles, who heads the Belgian police union. “A community policeman needs to be seen … as a partner, not an enemy.”

The suspicion cuts both ways in Molenbeek, where the IS cell spent months planning the Paris carnage and where one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, hid with what many officers believe was the blessing of the community.

“You can’t tell me no one knew where he was,” said Kris Vanstraeten, a police inspector in the area.

When police did find him, some youths hurled glass bottles and insults at them.

Molenbeek mayor Françoise Schepmans, who made her comment about the district of 95,000 being a nest of violence two days after the Paris attacks, says the police have a difficult role and relations are as good as they can be.

“It’s there to handle security, not to babysit,” she said.

But she says too few police know the areas where they operate. Of 50 federal officers sent to work in Molenbeek after the March bombings, none was even from the capital.”Sometimes we have young policemen who arrive and say ‘Uh-oh, where am I?’,” said local police spokesman Johan Berckmans.

Acknowledging that breaking down barriers was difficult, he said: “It’s always a question of ‘us and them’.”

Salah Abdeslam, a key suspect in November’s Paris attacks, will be extradited to France from Belgium in a few weeks to allow for additional questioning by Belgian investigators, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Abdeslam, who returned from Paris hours after the Islamic State attacks in which his brother blew himself up, hid from police for four months until he was captured in a raid on a house in the Brussels district of Molenbeek on March 18.

His finger prints were found three days earlier in an apartment in the southern Brussels borough of Forest after a gunbattle  during which an Islamist gunman was shot dead and four police officers were injured.

Prosecutors want to question him about that incident, his lawyer said. “There is a hearing, which will take place regarding the attempted murder of several police officers during the home search in Forest,” Sven Mary told reporters.

Abdeslam, who previously said that he wanted to be extradited to France, was not present at a court hearing in Brussels on Thursday.

“As I said, he wishes to go to France and that is the reason that things need to proceed and why we hope that it will be over in a few weeks,” Mary added.

The shooting and bombing rampage by Islamic State militants killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13.

(Reporting by Jan Vermeylen; Writing by Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by Philip Blenkinsop/Mark Heinrich) – for Reuters

The mass murder and carnage that took place today in Brussels has led to a measured response from the public and from others on social media. The sheer brutality of the killing has led to a response that has talked of communities ‘coming together’ against the extremists and terrorists. This is the right and proportionate response.

We talk much of the values of Europe and European communities. No-one can feel the pain of those families who have instantaneously lost loved ones this morning. Their pain and their memories may last a lifetime. At this time, we stand with them when they try and come to terms with what has happened.

Today in Europe, we face the threat of indiscriminate terrorism which targets public places where people gather. What many of the perpetrators look for is death and carnage, in their minds, safe in the knowledge that they have undertaken their instructions from cell leaders or even directly from Daesh or IS rhetoric. Where possible, these individuals should be captured alive as Belgian police did with Salah Abdeslam. No doubt, by interrogating these individuals and by putting them on trial, their aim of being lionised as people ‘who attacked the West’, can be be eroded and a picture shown to the public of their broken lives and their twisted narratives.

Yet, we should also ensure that reactions to the murders today do not stray into marginalising Muslim communities as a whole. Muslim communities are a solution to tackling the influences of groups like Daesh and IS. By marginalising them through press headlines, anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry and prejudice, we risk handing Daesh publicity and potential recruits which they could not have been able to access. We must therefore ensure that we include Muslim communities in the long term struggle against the rhetoric of Daesh and IS, as well as other groups who seek to drive a wedge between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. If anything, the values that we hold dear of pluralism, tolerance and the rule of law have real relevance at this time as we pursue peace through reducing the scourge of terrorism.