By Nurat Uthman
A Belgian court jailed dozens of people Tuesday in one of the country’s biggest ever drug trials, with ringleaders sentenced to up to 17 years behind bars.
More than 120 defendants from Belgium, Albania, Colombia and North Africa were accused of having participated in a multinational cocaine and cannabis trafficking enterprise after investigators cracked encrypted messaging apps
Judges issued sentences totalling more than 700 years in a case that shone a spotlight on Belgium’s role as Europe’s gateway for drugs.
Only nine of the accused were acquitted. Dozens of others received prison terms ranging from a few months to more than 15 years.
“It is an extremely harsh judgment,” Gilles Vanderbeck, a lawyer representing one of the alleged ringleaders, told AFP, noting the low number of exonerations and suspended sentences.
His client, Algerian Abdelwahab Guerni, was jailed for 17 years.
Guerni, a tall bald man, was among two dozen defendants who were led in handcuffs into a courtroom in the former headquarters of military alliance NATO in Brussels.
They sat in the dock faced by a line of police officers as judges read out the long list of verdicts.
Other accused who had been bailed pending the trial, sat in court to await their fate.
