Key suspect of Paris attacks caught

BRUSSELS: Police arrested three people including key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam, Europe’s most wanted man, in a raid by police in Brussels on Friday. French President Francois Hollande meanwhile called for his swift extradition.

Local media reported that Abdeslam, the 26-year-old Franco-Moroccan Da’ish (Arabic acronym for Islamic State)suspect believed to have played a key logistical role in the attacks, was wounded in a coordinated police operation.

Television footage showed armed security forces dragging a man with a sack on his head out of a building and into a car.

“We got him,” Belgium’s Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Theo Francken, announced on Twitter. Police though, are still searching for another three suspects.

Several bursts of gunfire rang out earlier in the capital’s Molenbeek area - the scene of past investigations into the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks - and police officers were seen surrounding an apartment block there from around 1500 GMT in the afternoon.

A witness told AFP the operation began at around 1530 GMT when dozens of police cars swooped into the gritty Molenbeek neighbourhood of the Belgian capital.

“I heard about three or four shots fired, but they were muffled as if taking place indoors,” said Karim, an Oxfam charity employee who lives in the largely Molenbeek.

Two explosions were heard after the arrest, though it was unclear whether they were part of a new operation or the clear-up.

At least three people had been arrested – including Abdeslam, Belgium’s Prime Minister Charles Michel confirmed.

“We have just arrested Salah Abdeslam. Three suspects were arrested,” Michel told a press conference alongside with French President.

Belgian police had found fingerprints belonging to Abdeslam at the scene of an apartment raided on Tuesday, prosecutors said earlier. The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office also said an Algerian killed during that earlier operation was probably one of the people French and Belgian investigators were seeking in relation to the Da’ish attacks in Paris.

Public broadcaster RTBF said it had information that Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up in Paris, was “more than likely” one of two men who police have said evaded capture at the scene before a sniper shot dead 35-year-old Belkaid as he aimed a Kalashnikov.

A man named Samir Bouzid has been sought since December when police issued CCTV pictures of him wiring cash from Brussels two days after the Paris attacks to a woman who was then killed in a shootout with police in the Paris suburb of St. Denis. She was a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who had fought in Syria and is suspected of being a prime organiser of the attacks in which 130 people were killed.

Both died in the apartment in St. Denis on November 18 during a police search.

Hollande said he expected the extradition of Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam “as quickly as possible” following his capture. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2016.