Two convicted jihad terrorists have had their residence permits withdrawn and are awaiting their repatriation to Morocco, a spokesperson for migration minister Theo Franken said. Malika El Aroud is known as “the black widow of jihad,” and is the widow of one of the men who assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, in 2001. The killers posed as journalists using false papers obtained in Belgium, and the assassination of one of the leading opponents of the Taliban is generally seen as the event which signalled the start of the campaign which would result in the attacks of September 11 that year.
El Aroud later remarried, to a man convicted of recruiting for Al Qaeda, while she herself was sentenced to eight years by a Belgian court on similar charges.
Kamal Affetat was for a time the spokesperson for Sharia4Belgium, the Antwerp-based extremist movement. He was convicted of making threats to a pre-school teacher who was at the centre of claims she abused the children in her care – charges which later proved utterly groundless.
Both have now had their residence permits withdrawn, and are being held in a closed detention centre awaiting their forced repatriation to Morocco. A new law passed last year allows the residence permits of foreigners to be withdrawn even if they were born here or arrived in the country as children aged under 12. The migration ministry declined to specify when the repatriation would take place, to avoid the possibility of demonstrations.
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
