Top suspect from Paris attack arrested in Belgium
March 18, 2016Salah Abdeslam, the top suspect from the Paris attacks in November 13 that killed 130 people, was arrested in Belgium on Friday, AFP reported.
“We got him,” Belgian immigration minister Theo Francken confirmed, minutes after French police announced the arrest of Abdeslam in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, home to several of the Islamic State commandos who took part in the massacre.
According to the news agency, Abdeslam was captured in Brussels during a raid by armed police.
It was not immediately clear if Abdeslam, 26, believed to have played a key role in the November 13 attacks claimed by the Islamic State group that left 130 people dead, was injured in the raid.
One man was injured and another arrested unharmed in the raid, French police sources said, without identifying which was Abdeslam.
The arrest came hours after prosecutors revealed that Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found in an apartment in another part of Brussels earlier this week, following a raid in which a suspected Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist was killed.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel held a crisis meeting after the arrest with French President Francois Hollande, who was in Brussels for a European Union summit, according to AFP.
There had been a manhunt for Abdeslam ever since the November 13 attacks. At one point it was speculated that he fled from Belgium to Germany.
Subsequent reports indicated he had traveled to Hungary before the attacks in Paris, where he “recruited a team” from unregistered migrants passing through.
According to AFP, it is believed Abdeslam had been holed up in a flat in Brussels for at least three weeks.
He slipped past three police checks in France as he fled to Belgium just hours after the terror assaults, a source close to the probe said in December.
The ringleader of the attacks, ISIS member Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was also from Brussels. He was killed in a raid in Paris in November.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)
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