Al-Qaida militants plotted to bomb US troop base storing nuclear weapons
Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who once played professional soccer in Germany, was given the maximum sentence of 10 years by the Brussels court.
He had admitted planning to drive a car bomb into the canteen of the Kleine Brogel air base, where 100 US military personnel work.
Another Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, was sentenced to six years for his involvement in the 2001 assassination of an anti-Taliban military commander in Afghanistan.
Sixteen others were convicted of lesser crimes and received sentences ranging from two to five years. Five defendants were acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
Prosecutors said the group had formed a "spider's web" of Islamic radicals, plotting attacks and recruiting fighters in Europe for al-Qaida and the now-deposed Taliban in Afghanistan.
Trabelsi, who says he met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and asked to become a suicide bomber, was arrested two days after the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001.
His arrest led to the discovery of the raw materials for a huge bomb in the back of a Brussels restaurant.
Trabelsi's accomplices Amor Sliti, 44, and Abdelcrim El-Haddouti, 26 each got five years for similar charges.
"Terrorism has destroyed the liberty and freedom of individuals," Judge Claire de Gryse said at the end of Belgium's biggest-ever terrorism trial.
"While bin Laden was preparing for attacks on the United States, Trabelsi, with others, was preparing and looking for explosives in Europe," the judge concluded.
She said phone and credit card records showed Trabelsi's links with terrorist cells in other parts of Europe. Evidence from Belgian army experts on the explosives gathered by Trabelsi showed the attack was "technically possible," de Gryse said.
Although he admitted to the Kleine Brogel plot, Trabelsi has denied allegations, made by a terrorist suspect held in France, that he also plotted to blow up the US Embassy in Paris.
