Twenty-seven deportation experts today will hold an extraordinary meeting to examine “how to force the return to the country of origin” of immigrants “who have a deportation order and who pose potential security risks”. announced yesterday the European Commissioner for the Interior, Ylva Johansson, in response to the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of two Swedish citizens in Brussels on Monday. Europe must “learn the lessons” of this case, claimed the representatives of Belgium and Sweden to their colleagues at the Council of Ministers of the Interior of the EU held in Luxembourg.
“The terrorist who committed the attack had applied for asylum in four different European countries and had been rejected all four times because he did not meet the conditions”, denounced the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Nicole de Moor. “He was not, therefore, a refugee”, but this situation is “unacceptable”, he said. The man “arrived in Italy in 2011 and had been wandering around European territory for twelve years” in an irregular situation, added the Belgian Minister of Justice, Annelies Verlinden, who admitted that her Government did not know that he had spent time in sweden
The individual accused of committing the attack, who was shot dead by the police in the early hours of Tuesday, has been identified by the Belgian press as Abdesalem Lassoued, a 45-year-old man of Tunisian nationality. Lassoued arrived in Lampedusa during the Arab Spring, in 2011. In June of that same year, he asked for asylum in Norway – a country that is not part of the EU but is part of the Schengen zone – but his sole… request was rejected and he was returned to Italy. His steps reappeared, however, in Sweden.
The Nordic country’s Immigration Agency has confirmed that the suspect lived there between 2012 and 2014. He spent part of that time in prison before being returned to the EU country he entered through. in Community territory, as stipulated in the Dublin Regulation. Between 2014 and 2017 he lived in various parts of Italy, where the anti-terrorist services identified him as an extremist, according to the newspaper Il Corriere de la Sera. Italy tried to deport him to Tunisia but the proceedings were put on hold when he applied for asylum, and he was lost sight of before his case was reviewed.
The Belgian Government has confirmed that Lassoued applied for asylum in the country in 2019, a request that was rejected in October 2020. The individual was suspected of participating in human trafficking networks and representing a security risk , so in 2021 he was ordered to leave the country. Lassoued, however, disappeared from the radar before the measure could be executed. Given the speed with which Belgian police found his home on Monday night, hours after he shot and killed two Swedish citizens who had traveled to Brussels to attend a football match, victims he is suspected of looking for deliberately because of his nationality, the opposition questions that the Government could not do anything to expel him.
“This is not the time to blame each other, but this terrorist attack should be a wake-up call to advance the return policy”, claimed the European Commissioner for Justice, who recalled that Tunisia, unlike other North African countries, does collaborate and accept the return of immigrants in an irregular situation. One of the regulations of the European Migration Pact project, which the Council is currently negotiating with the European Parliament, envisages making it mandatory to deport people who are believed to represent a danger to security.
The Acting Minister of the Interior and current President of the European Council of Ministers of the branch, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, yesterday asked the member states to be flexible in order to close the negotiation with the Eurochamber as soon as possible and thus have “a definitive regulatory framework that allows us to face the migration challenge with more guarantees”. The purpose of today’s technical meeting on returns of irregular immigrants is to examine what can be done with the current legal framework to speed them up, as well as to prepare a possible pilot project to cooperate more in this field and expedite the procedures