A Belgian court in Antwerp has sentenced the leader of a radical Islamic group, called Sharia4Belgium, that recruited youngsters to fight in Syria, to 12 years imprisonment.
The court ruled that the group was a terrorist organization that wanted to violently overthrow democracy and replace it with strict sharia law.
The court in Antwerp sentenced the group's "charismatic leader," Fouad Belkacem, to 12 years' imprisonment.
Fouad Belkacem, the group’s leader, was led into court in handcuffs by police in body armour at the end of the country's biggest-ever terror trial.
Forty-six Islamists were indicted, but only a handful appeared in court as others are believed to be fighting in Syria or to have died in its civil war.
Wednesday’s verdict delivers crucial legal backing to the Belgian authorities in their efforts to dismantle European recruitment networks for Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
Recruiting network Sharia4Belgium wants to convert Belgium — whose capital of Brussels is also the capital of the European Union — into an Islamic State. The group is one of the most prolific recruiters of European fighters for al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.
The number of people going to Syria from Belgium is one of the highest in Europe in per-capita terms. About 300 Muslim Belgians, the vast majority young men, have traveled to fight on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields, and about a third of them have returned, according to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College in London.