82 seconds of terror at Brussels’ Jewish museum
CLÉMENT ZAMPA
Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche goes on trial Thursday for the calm, calculated murder of four people on May 24, 2014
A Jewish boy standing with flowers in front of an Israeli flag and flowers laid outside the Jewish Museum in Brussels, where a deadly shooting took place two days before, May 26, 2014. (AFP/Belga/Anthony Dehez)
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AFP) — A shadow creeps behind two visitors just inside the Jewish museum in Brussels. A man emerges, arm extended as he fires a pistol into their necks.
The first bullet kills Emanuel Riva, the second, his wife Miriam, with the couple dropping to the floor in a ghoulish scene captured by the museum’s security cameras.
Neither Israeli tourist sees the shooter coming as they are engrossed in the museum’s prospectus.
They are the first of four people to die in the museum attack on May 24, 2014. Charged with those murders, Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche goes on trial in Brussels on Thursday.
Dressed in a blue jacket with a cap on his head, the shooter then walks resolutely up to the reception desk and accosts a young employee, firing a bullet into his forehead.
Pictures released on June 1, 2014, shows the then-29-year-old suspected terrorist Mehdi Nemmouche. (AFP)
Alexandre Strens, 26, dies of his injuries two weeks later.
In a small room nearby a woman curls up in panic behind her desk. The gunman fires at her but misses so he takes an assault rifle out of one of the two bags he brought with him.
The door locks automatically before he opens fire and he kicks it open. He walks toward her, fires three shots, two of them into her head.
Collapsing under her desk, Dominique Sabrier, a French volunteer in her sixties, becomes his fourth victim.
The gunman tucks away his weapon and leaves the museum without a word. Witnesses say he left the scene calmly before melting into the crowd on that spring Saturday afternoon.
Investigators say the four murders took only 82 seconds. The shooter fired a total of 13 shots, five from his handgun and eight from the Kalashnikov rifle.