Abdeslam’s brother, Ibrahim, was a suicide bomber in the Paris attacks who killed himself when he detonated explosives outside a cafe on Boulevard Voltaire.
Advertisement
Abdeslam, set to be extradited to France, has renewed an offer to cooperate with authorities investigating the Paris attacks, his lawyer said this week.
After his arrest, he told the investigators that he was meant to carry out a suicide bombing at the Stade de France stadium, but backed out at the last minute.
Another French suspect, 32-year-old Anis Bahri, was arrested in Rotterdam in the Netherlands at the weekend in connection with the plot.
The 33-year-old Belgian national was only identified by his initials, Y.A., and was charged with “participating in the activities of a terrorist group”.
The main plot suspect is Reda Kriket, 34, who was arrested near Paris last week.
However no flight has been scheduled before Saturday, and according to Belgian newspaper Le Soir, police unions have blocked the move because of a disagreement with airport authorities over security measures.
The Brussels-based Abdeslam family, Mohamed told the French network, has received numerous threats in the two weeks since his brother’s arrest.
Brussels airport authorities say they are ready to resume flights from the bomb-damaged facility soon but not before the weekend.
Soldiers and police combed through a wooded area by a busy motorway near Courtrai in northwestern Belgium, the latest in a series of raids since the Paris and Brussels terror attacks exposed a tangled web of cross-border jihadist cells.
Arnaud Feist, CEO of Brussels Airport Co., said the Brussels Airlines flights to Athens, Turin in Italy and Faro in Portugal, the first of which he said should take off around 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) Sunday, were chiefly symbolic.
Advertisement
Since Kriket’s arrest in the Paris suburbs on March 24, two others have been arrested in Belgium for colluding with him: a man authorities have identified only as Rabah M., 34, and Abderahmane Ameroud, 38. Najim Laachraoui, the second airport bomber, once drove with Abdeslam to Hungary. The lawyer says 259 minors traveling alone were kept in the holding area in 2014; adults and children can both be held there for up to 20 days if they arrive in France without papers, after which they are either allowed in or deported. Abdeslam’s arrest suspected prompted to change the date of the attack and carry out the attack in Brussels. Molenbeek, a neighborhood with a large Muslim community, has served as the departure point for many of those who attacked Paris in November and Brussels in March.
