An architect of one of France’s deadliest terror attacks, the Bataclan massacre of 2016, has been given recurring leaves from prison in Belgium, a local newspaper reported.
Mohamed Bakkali, the mastermind of the Bataclan attack, where jihadists murdered some 130 people at the Bataclan music club and in explosions elsewhere in the Paris region, was given five leaves of 36 hours in 2025, and was just given another six earlier this month, the Le Capitale newspaper reported last week.
Bakkali was sentenced to 30 years for the Bataclan and the attacks of November 2026 and another 25 years for planning a terror attack on the Thalys train that connects Amsterdam and Paris.
Although he was convicted in France in 2020, Bakkali was extradited to Belgium, allowing him to enjoy a more lenient policy than he would have encountered in France, Le Capitale reported. In Belgium, he will be considered for parole after serving a third of his sentence, the report said.
Ralph Pais, the spokesperson of Belgium’s Jewish Information and Documentation Center (JID), a Jewish community watchdog group, condemned the decision to grant Bakkali leaves.
“Europe has completely lost the plot. This outrageous decision shows how dangerously disconnected certain elites and parts of our justice system have become from reality,” Pais told JNS on Sunday.
He lamented “the message this sends” to “the victims’ families, to the survivors who still live with trauma every single day” and to “the police officers and intelligence services risking their lives to prevent the next massacre.“
As terror threats remain extremely high across Europe, “our justice system chooses to show leniency toward one of the men who helped organise the deadliest Islamist attack in modern European history,” Pais added.
Europe will one day “have to answer for this dangerous culture of naïveté, denial, and weakness in the face of Islamist terror,” said Pais. Meanwhile, “The blood of the Bataclan victims should have been enough to draw a line, but apparently, it was not,” he said.
