Ibrahim Akhlal is a fugitive from Belgium where he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for a series of armed robberies. He is also wanted by the Netherlands where he faces charges related to a gold heist of “exceptional brutality,” which involved a car chase and shootout with police.

Despite an extradition request from Belgium, and another one from the Netherlands, Akhlal remains in prison in the West African nation of Guinea.

Akhlal, who is a citizen of both Belgium and Morocco, was sentenced in Guinea for escaping prison there after his conviction for using a fraudulent passport. But his term expired more than a year ago.

Guinea has no extradition treaty with either Belgium or the Netherlands, but under the law, authorities can honor such a request if they choose to. Guinean officials declined to comment on the extradition requests, and would not explain why Akhlal is still incarcerated.

“Ibrahim Akhlal is being illegally and arbitrarily detained in the Central Prison,” said his lawyer, Mory Doumbouya.

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In an interview in his office, behind the overcrowded prison in the Guinean capital of Conakry where Akhlal is held, Doumbouya described his client as a “hostage of the Guinean judicial system.”

Guinean court files accessed by OCCRP confirm that Akhlal has served his sentence.

Speaking anonymously as they were not authorised to talk to journalists, three Guinean officials — from the legal, law enforcement, and prison sectors — confirmed that Akhlal is still incarcerated in Conakry.

Akhlal appears to be stuck in a diplomatic standoff, according to Kars de Bruijne of Clingendael, a research institute in The Hague.

“He is really caught between a rock and a hard place,” he said after reviewing Akhlal’s situation.

“According to the Guinean law he should be released,” said de Bruijne, who is the institute’s programme lead for West Africa and the Sahel. However, if the Guineans release Akhal without extraditing him, “they could get in trouble with the Netherlands and Belgium.”

"We receive updates on Akhlal’s situation via our embassy in Conakry," the spokesperson told VRT.

Jailbreak and a Gold Heist

At just 30 years old, Akhlal already has a series of criminal master strokes under his belt.

In March 2020, he escaped St. Gilles prison in Brussels where he was awaiting judgement on cases involving armed robbery, forgery, theft and organized crime — charges that later resulted in multiple convictions amounting to a 21-year prison sentence.

While on the run, Akhlal allegedly took part in an attack on an armored truck transporting precious metals in Amsterdam. Seven men involved in the robbery were convicted. Akhlal has been indicted and charged, but still needs to go to trial.

Official statements from the Amsterdam Court of Justice and the Public Prosecutor’s Office describe the heist — and what happened next.

At least eight men, allegedly including Akhlal, had targeted the premises of Schöne Edelmetaal, a precious metals dealer and processor in a northern suburb of the Dutch capital in May 2021. As a new transport arrived, the men were waiting outside in two Audis and a Porsche Cayenne. They broke into the warehouse, using one of the cars as a battering ram.

Armed with automatic weapons and wearing balaclavas, the attackers tied up employees and loaded gold and other precious metals worth an estimated $16 million into the cars. Then they fled the scene.

A high-speed car chase followed, with the suspects — allegedly including Akhal — shooting at pursuing police vehicles. Some suspects were cornered in a cow field near a hamlet where one was shot and killed. Police arrested six men.

Akhlal resurfaced a year-and-a-half later, thousands of miles away in West Africa. In what was hailed as a success of “effective international cooperation,” by the Belgian Federal Police, he was tracked to the Republic of Guinea and arrested there.

In a letter addressed to the Guinean Attorney General seven days after the arrest, then-Minister of Justice Alphonse Charles Wright specified that Akhlal had entered Guinea on September 22, 2022.

“In order to hide his identity, he fraudulently obtained administrative documents, notably a passport of the Republic of Guinea,” he wrote in the letter.

Following the arrest, Belgian police issued a statement saying that authorities were “actively in contact with their Guinean counterparts in order to proceed with the extradition of the former fugitive as soon as possible.”

More than three years later, Belgium’s extradition request is still pending while Akhlal remains imprisoned in Conakry.

In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal last year convicted seven men, with sentences ranging from nine to 15-and-a-half years for robbing the transport vehicle carrying precious metals.

The Amsterdam Court of Justice described the robbery as one of “exceptional brutality” with “excessive violence.”

Akhlal still faces a string of charges in the Netherlands related to the robbery. They include theft and “attempted aggravated manslaughter of police officers... [by] multiple shots with (automatic) firearms,” as well as arson and property damage.

Unanswered Questions

Motorcycle taxis wind through the bustling streets of Kaloum, Conakry’s business district, zipping past street vendors and taxis carrying loads of bananas on their roofs. All activity comes to a frequent halt to make way for military convoys escorting the president from the palace to his residence.

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Amid the hustle is Conakry’s Court of First Instance. In a dimly lit room stacked with files and notebooks, a clerk retrieved books containing Akhlal’s sentences inscribed in blue and red ink.

The records show that on January 8, 2023, shortly after his arrest, Akhlal was sentenced to two years in prison, with one year suspended. The charges were “forgery and use of forged documents in public records” related to his possession of a Guinean passport under a false identity.

In June 2023, he escaped prison. Wright, the justice minister at the time, later said “armed men” were complicit in the escape. In an interview with the Belgian broadcaster VRT, Wright later condemned the "flagrant complicity" in the escape of several guards and prison employees.

Several weeks after his escape, Akhlal was apprehended in the northern Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou. The city lies near the border of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony largely controlled by Morocco, but considered a disputed territory, where the Polisario Front launched an armed independence campaign in 1973.

A Mauritanian police officer told OCCRP that Akhlal stayed in the town for several days in the pink-painted Hotel Sahel, where he asked staff to turn off security cameras. He was arrested in the Grand Mosque, not far from the hotel, with several phones, large stashes of money and was “very skinny and stressed.”

The Attorney General at the Court of Appeal of Conakry, Fallou Doumbouya — a common name in Guinea, which he shares with Akhlal’s lawyer — declined to comment.

"I have absolutely nothing to tell you,” he said to a reporter in his office in December. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.

Meanwhile, Akhlal’s lawyer insists that his client’s detention has no legal basis. Akhlal remains behind bars “for reasons that are beyond our understanding,” added the lawyer, Mory Doumbouya.

Also a mystery is Guinea’s decision not to extradite Akhlal. Although the West African nation does not have an official treaty with either Belgium or the Netherlands, Guinea’s Code of Criminal Procedure allows extradition upon the discretion of authorities.

The Guinean ministries of justice and foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment on the Belgian and Dutch requests.

De Bruijne of the Clingendael Institute said extraditions are tricky even with countries in the region that have such treaties.

“It is a big problem,” he said, pointing to the Netherlands’ failure to persuade Sierra Leone to extradite Jos Leijdekkers, a cocaine kingpin on Europol’s most wanted list.

Leijdekkers was sentenced in absentia by a Rotterdam court to 24 years in prison for large-scale cocaine trafficking, ordering a murder, and involvement in a violent robbery. He has also been convicted in Belgium in separate drug-related cases.

“To be honest, it is always a bit of guesswork, also on my part, on what the reason is that countries refuse to extradite people with a clear criminal profile,” said de Bruijne.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service offered no explanation as to why Akhlal was still being held in Guinea despite the extradition requests.

The Belgian Embassy in Conakry, and the Federal Public Service Justice, a state body that plays a key role in international judicial cooperation, both declined to comment.

The Belgian Federal Police said their rule was to “not communicate about ongoing cases.”

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