Salah Abdeslam was arrested after a shootout with police.
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After an intense four-month manhunt across Europe and beyond, police on Friday captured Salah Abdeslam, the top suspect in last year’s deadly Paris attacks, in the same Brussels neighborhood where he grew up.
Hollande, who was in Brussels for an European Union summit when the raid took place, described Abdeslam as “directly linked to the preparation, the organization and, unfortunately, the perpetration of these attacks”.
Caroline Langlade, the vice president of another victims group, Life for Paris, said Abdeslam’s trial would provide a chance “to try to understand what might be going on in the heads of these French and Belgian young people who are radicalised”. In all, 130 people were killed at several venues around Paris on that night. The alternative method would allow Belgium to hand over Abdeslam to France without government involvement.
Belgian authorities have officially charged him and another man who was using two aliases “with participation in terrorist murder” and in the activities of a terrorist organisation.
The elusive suspect, who has been on the run for several months since November’s attacks, has been charged with participation in terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group, BBC reported.
Another man, Monir Ahmed Alaaj, and three members of a family that allegedly hid Abdeslam, were also arrested in the Belgian capital, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
“My clients wish today that Abdeslam is extradited (to France from Belgium), handed over to the French judicial authorities as soon as possible – of course, after he has exhausted all the judicial remedies available to him according to European law”.
“He is cooperating with Belgian justice”, Sven Mary told reporters Saturday in Brussels, NBC News reported. The body based in Lyon, France, said the passport had been recorded in Interpol’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database in April 2014.
French President Francois Hollande said on Friday that he “had confidence in the successful completion of the extradition request”.
Salah Abdeslam had meant to be a suicide bomber at the city’s main sports stadium but pulled out at the last minute.
Belgian intelligence officers managed to finally catch Abdeslam after four months on the run by tapping his phone after correctly predicting he would break cover around the time of his brother’s funeral.
In that raid, a man believed to have been an accomplice of Abdeslam – Mohamed Belkaid – was shot dead, Belgian prosecutors say. He was injured while being captured by police at a property only half a kilometer away from his home.
A woman detainee, Djemila M., was charged with aiding and abetting but released, the prosecutors said in a statement.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said Saturday he hopes Abdeslam can be brought to France to face justice.
Mar 20, 2016- Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has admitted he wanted to blow himself up but then changed his mind, a French prosecutor says.
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Possibly Abdeslam’s closest brush with police came in the immediate aftermath of the November 13 attacks, when he and contacts from Brussels were stopped at a French police checkpoint but let through.
