AP
BRUSSELS, MARCH 19
Police raiding an apartment building captured Europe’s most wanted fugitive on Friday, arresting the prime suspect in last year’s deadly Paris attacks in the same Brussels neighborhood where he grew up.
Hours later, the French president said more people were involved in the attacks than initially thought, and predicted more arrests would follow.
Salah Abdeslam, 26, is a childhood friend of the suspected ringleader of the attacks. Investigators believe he drove a car carrying a group of gunmen who took part in the shootings, rented rooms and shopped for detonators. He may have been planning a suicide attack himself.
After the bloodbath, he slipped through a dragnet to return to Brussels and eluded capture for four months, despite an international manhunt. He was believed to have slipped through police fingers multiple times. At one point, Belgian authorities locked down their capital for several days but failed to find him.
His capture brought instant relief to police and ordinary people in France and Belgium who had been looking over their shoulder for Abdeslam since Nov. 13, when Islamic extremist attackers fanned out across the French capital and killed 130 people at a rock concert, the national stadium and cafes. It was France’s deadliest attack in decades.
Abdeslam and four other suspects were detained in Friday’s raid, including three members of a family that sheltered him. Abdeslam was shot in the leg and was hospitalized, and another arrested with him was also wounded, officials said.
During Friday’s police operation, a phalanx of officers in camouflage, masks and riot helmets marched through the neighborhood with guns and automatic weapons drawn, escorting people out of buildings.
A witness described hearing gunshots and officers repeatedly yelling over a loudspeaker to suspects holed up inside the apartment building.
Authorities first sealed off the neighborhood. Then police began shouting to a particular apartment, demanding that the occupants come out with their hands up, said Fatiha Hrika, a 39-year-old child-care worker who lives a few doors down from where the raid happened.
France’s BFM television broadcast images of police tugging a man with a white hooded sweatshirt toward a police car, as he dragged his left leg as if it were injured.
Abdeslam was not armed but did not immediately obey orders when confronted by police, Belgian prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt said.
It was possible he had spent days, weeks or months in the apartment, according to Van der Sypt, who said the investigation would continue day and night.
French President Francois Hollande said authorities will continue hunting for anyone who aided the attacks in any way. He said those people are much more numerous than authorities had believed, and that the French government would seek to have Abdeslam extradited.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel called Friday’s arrests a success in the “fight against terrorism.”
Friday’s capture of Abdeslam came after Belgian authorities said they found his fingerprints in an apartment raided earlier this week in another Brussels neighborhood.
In that raid, a man believed to have been an accomplice of Abdeslam Mohamed Belkaid, was shot dead, Belgian prosecutors said. But two men escaped from the apartment, one of whom appears to have been Abdeslam.
Most of the Paris attackers died on the night of the attacks, including Abdeslam’s brother Brahim, who blew himself up. Brahim Abdeslam was buried in the Brussels area Thursday. Salah’s Abdeslam’s role in the attacks has never been clearly spelled out. The car he drove was abandoned in northern Paris, and his mobile phone and an explosive vest he may have used were later found in the Paris suburb of Montrouge, raising the possibility that he aborted his mission, either ditching a malfunctioning vest or fleeing in fear. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks.
