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2016-04-09 Europe
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Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini arrested
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 Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini was arrested on April 8, a police source told AFP after a Belgian television station said he was detained in a Brussels district. The police source gave no details about the location or circumstances of Abrini's arrest but VRT television said it took place in the Anderlecht district of Brussels, home to several other suspects linked to the Paris attacks.
Abrini, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, was seen at a petrol station north of Paris two days before the attacks with key suspect Salah Abdeslam, who drove one of the vehicles used in the Nov. 13 assaults across Paris that killed 130 people.
The Belgian federal prosecutor's office said they would provide more details later about the arrests in connection with the Brussels attacks.
| More details from The Times of Israel at 12:15 p.m. ET: |
Belgium still unsure whether suspect Abrini is ‘man in hat’
Belgian authorities said the remaining fugitive suspect in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks was arrested in Belgium on Friday, after a raid linked to the deadly March 22 Brussels bombings yielded five detentions in all.
The suspect, Mohamed Abrini, could be the mysterious “man in the hat” who escaped the double bombing at the Zaventem airport, but federal prosecutors said they still needed further verification.
“We are investigating if Abrini can be identified as the third person at the Brussels national airport, the so- called man with the hat,” said prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt.
Another man arrested on Friday, Osama K., alias Naim al Ahmed, was seen with Brussels subway bomber Khalid El Bakraoui just before the March 22 attacks, the prosecutor said. Osama K. was also filmed by security cameras in the City 2 shopping mall when the bags were bought that were used by the suicide bombers who attacked Brussels Airport the same morning.
Belgian prosecutors said fingerprints and DNA from Abrini had been found in a Renault Clio used in the Paris attacks, and in an apartment in the Forest area of the Belgian capital that was used by Salah Abdeslam, another Paris suspect, as a hideout until police stumbled upon it.
Friday’s arrest of five suspects came a day after Belgian authorities released photos and video of the “man in the hat” airport suspect. Five hours after the initial detentions, authorities were still carrying out a raid in the same Anderlecht area of Brussels.
Abrini’s precise role in the Paris attacks has never been clear, as is his full link to the Brussels. He is a 31-year-old Belgian-Moroccan petty criminal believed to have traveled early last summer to Syria where his younger brother died in 2014 in the Islamic State group’s notorious francophone brigade. He had not resurfaced since the emergence of surveillance video placing him in the convoy with the attackers headed to Paris. He had ties to Abdelhamid Abbaoud, the ringleader of the Paris attacks who died in a police standoff on Nov. 18, and is a childhood friend of brothers Salah and Brahim Abdeslam.
He went multiple times to Birmingham, England, last year, meeting with several men suspected of terrorist activity, a European security official has told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide details on the investigation. He said the meetings, including one later last summer, took place in several locations, including cafes and apartments. He was traveling with Salah Abdeslam, who is in jail in Belgium for involvement in the Paris attacks, in the convoy headed to Paris in the 36 hours leading up to the attacks.
The man in the hat was with the two suicide bombers who killed 16 people at Brussels airport on March 22. A second arrest could also be linked to the Maelbeek subway bombing that killed another 16 people during rush hour that morning.
On Thursday, authorities released photos and video of a man wearing a dark hat, leaving the airport on foot, walking to the nearby town of Zaventem and then into Brussels, where all traces of him were reportedly lost.
Swedish media said Osama K. was Osama Krayem, 23, who grew up in the southern city of Malmo, and published photographs of him holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle in front of an IS flag said to have been taken in Syria.
Osama Krayem is the product of a "now classic cocktail of social marginalization, ideological radicalization" and criminality, Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on radical Islamic movements at the Swedish National Defense College, told AFP. 
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Posted by Steve White 2016-04-09 00:00||
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