“Salah Abdeslam told me that he wishes to leave for France as soon as possible”, Mary said.
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Abdeslam is a key suspect in November’s Paris attacks, which left 130 people dead.
TEMPO.CO, Brussels-Belgian police arrested seven people and Germany arrested two in investigations into Islamic State suicide bombings in Brussels, while authorities in France said they thwarted a militant plot there “that was at an advanced stage”.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks in Brussels and Paris, which have laid bare European security failings and prompted calls for better intelligence cooperation and a tougher response to Islamic State extremists.
On Wednesday, a Turkish official said Turkey had deported Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who Belgian authorities say attacked the airport along with Laachraoui, to the Netherlands past year and had warned that he was a foreign fighter captured on Turkey’s border with Syria.
Six people were detained in late-night raids Thursday across the Belgian capital, as French authorities also grabbed a man suspected of plotting an imminent attack.
The unidentified man and his whereabouts are unknown, while the site is still being examined in the event his body is to be found amidst debris.
Najim Laachraoui is still at large but has not been identified as the third man from the airport’s security cameras footage. Authorities reportedly honed in on him after finding his fingerprints in an apartment in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where several of the attackers, including Abdeslam, lived and plotted.
The two attacks killed at least 31 people and injured hundreds. They are believed to have blown themselves up in the attacks.
Public broadcaster RTBF said a seventh man was arrested in the Forest borough of Brussels early on Friday. There is a question at to whether there may also have been a second attacker at the metro bombing. “The federal prosecutor has just informed me that Salah Abdeslam no longer wants to talk since the attacks on Zaventem and the Brussels metro”, Geens told a parliament committee on Friday looking into the attacks.
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“It’s much easier to get into Europe than to get into the United States for example because of geography”, said Daniel Benjamin, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism.
