The Jewish museum in Brussels will reopen on Sunday under tight security, in a message of defiance against "brutes" after a gunman shot dead four people there in May, officials said.
Museum officials also said on Tuesday that the French suspect held in what the authorities describe as a terrorist-linked shooting does not want to take part in a reconstruction of the events as part of the legal case against him.
"We should not give free rein – I dare say – to bastards," the museum's secretary general, Norbert Cige, told reporters when asked what message the reopening gave. "We are continuing our educational work. In this world of brutes, it's necessary."
Unlike synagogues and other Jewish community sites in Brussels, the museum did not have special security precautions before the 24 May attack.
But on Sunday, two police officers will guard the entrance, a metal detector will be set up and visitors searched, officials said. The museum president, Philippe Blondin, added: "The public and our staff can be reassured."
Two exhibitions that began before the shooting – Warsawwarsaw and The dress is elsewhere – will resume. Another, Gotlib's worlds, will open to the public on 13 November and run through to 15 February next year.
In the longer term, part of the museum in the heart of Brussels will be demolished and rebuilt.
Blondin said: "We want, with absolute determination, to retake our place in the cultural arena of Brussels."
Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian origin who was extradited from France to Belgium in July and charged with the murders, "does not want to take part in the reconstruction" of the event, Blondin said.
Nonetheless, he said, Nemmouche will "perhaps be brought to the scene" for the re-enactment designed to help prosecutors piece together the crime. "But will he speak, will he cooperate? We know nothing," Blondin, said hoping the reconstruction would happen as "quickly as possible".
Officials had said earlier the museum would remain closed until the re-enactment, but Blondin said the investigating judge finally agreed that it could reopen Sunday on condition that nothing be changed to the entrance where the four people were gunned down.
Sunday is a European day of Jewish culture.
