At the start of the trial of Mehdi Nemmouche, the man accused of carrying out an armed attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels in May 2014 in which four people died, the defence laid out its main five-point defence case. They included the lack of circumstantial evidence of fingerprints on the door of the museum and the trigger of the handgun used, as well as the doubt surrounding whether the man seen on security footage was in fact Nemmouche.
Nobody mentioned the shoe-print. On the door of the museum, investigators discovered a partial print of the sole of a shoe, caused when the gunman used his foot to kick the door open – thus leaving no fingerprints.
The print of the shoe is a match for Calvin Klein trainers owned by Nemmouche, And what is more, in a detail that could have come from an episode of Columbo or indeed the OJ Simpson trial, only eight pairs of those trainers were ever sold in Belgium.
“Six pairs of the same colour were sold between June 2013 and March 2014, ad two pairs of anther colour sold in December 2013,” testified the scenes of crime officer in charge of the find. “Among those eight pairs, there were two of size 43 as worn by Mehdi Nemmouche. They were sold by a hop on the Rue Neuve in Brussels. One [pair] was bought on 30 April 2014 with cash, and the other was bought by a man with a customer card.”
Elsewhere, Nemmouche has agreed to have his voice recorded and the recording analysed for comparison with a video made by a man who claims responsibility for the attack, discovered on a laptop Nemmouche was carrying when he was arrested by French police in Marseilles a week after the attack. Nemmouche denies the video is his; voice analysis will seek to compare the two voices to prove the question one way or the other.
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
