The prosecutor’s office said Mohamed Abrini as caught on film with Abdeslam in a gas station on the highway to Paris.
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Police targeted the apartment in northern Paris while hunting the attacks’ suspected ringleader Abaaoud, who was killed along with his female cousin, Hasna Aitboulahcen, and another as-yet unidentified man. Five people, including two who travelled with Abdeslam back to Brussels, have been charged with terrorist offences in Belgium.
Michel, seeking to avert what officials said was a plot to launch similar coordinated attacks in Brussels, said the threat remains “serious and imminent” and Belgium remains at its highest alert level.
Increased security measures in the wake of the massacre in Paris have virtually shut down the Belgian capital, with the subway system, many shops and schools remaining closed.
Police and soldiers guard Brussels’ main train station, which is still open for passengers coming in from out of town, November 24, 2015.
Many stayed at home as the terror alert prevented a return to normal in the city that is host to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance and European Union’s main institutions.
According to the Times, Salah Abdeslam, who is thought to be the eighth gunman in the Paris attacks, was known to visit a Brussels gay bar where patrons remember him smoking hash, drinking and flirting with other men.
Sirens wailed through the streets and troops patrolled the streets as part of a terror lockdown and manhunt for one or more suspected extremists including Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the November 13 Paris attacks. Authorities said the vest didn’t have a detonator, but a police official said the vest contained bolts and the same type of explosive used in the Paris attacks.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told lawmakers on Tuesday police have recovered 230 weapons and charged 124 people during 1,230 anti-terror searches since French officals declared a state of emergency a day after the attacks. His fingerprints, Molins said, were found in a vehicle connected with the attacks, and particularly on the key.
In the French capital, prosecutor Molins revealed that an explosives vest found Monday in a bag of rubbish in the suburb of Montrouge was “exactly the same construction as the others” used by the suicide bombers in the attacks.
The hunt for Abdeslam has stretched to several countries in Western Europe, but so far, he hasn’t been spotted since authorities named him as a suspect.
Belgian authorities described Abrini as 5 feet 8 inches tall with an athletic build and said he is “armed and unsafe”.
HANDOUT/REUTERS Suspected mastermind Abaaoud Abdelhamid was killed in a confrontation with police in Paris last week.
The analysis “leads us to believe that Abaaoud returned to the scene of the crimes after the attack carried out on the people sitting at tables at restaurants and while the BRI (elite police) was intervening at the Bataclan”, the prosecutor said.
Leger said that neither she nor her children were too concerned about an imminent attack.
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Sources in France close to the investigation believe Abdeslam could not have survived so long on the run without help, which might involve a support network in Belgium.
