PARIS RINGLEADER NABBED IN BELGIUM SHOOTOUT
• After an intense four- month manhunt across Europe and beyond, police on Friday captured the top fugitive in the Paris attacks in the same Brussels neighbourhood where he grew up.
Salah Abdeslam was shot in the leg and detained by police during a raid in Molenbeek.
“We got him,” s ai d Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens.
Police were still searching for another suspect who was believed to be holed up in a house just a few dozen metres f r om t wo s c hools. Helmeted police with riot shields cordoned off the area and hours after the raid, explosions were heard in the area. Belgium’s VTM t elevision channel reported that a third suspect was arrested, but there was no immediate official confirmation.
A f ormer Belgian f orce special forces soldier speaking to BFM TV said arresting one of the ringleaders in the attacks that killed 130 people was amazing.
“To be able to arrest him is quite an amazing feat. But whereas the other attackers blew themselves up in the past, this is the guy who refused to die in the attack and fled in his car while the others did. It looks like he doesn’t want to die,” he said.
Jean Louis Bru gui ere, a former anti-terror judge in Belgium, said: “There is nothing new about Molen- beek being a place with terrorism problems, it has been like that since the 1990s.
“But nowadays it is easier to catch people hiding in these places because of the advances in technology, social media and such, which may have had a role in tracking him down in this case.”
Brussels- born Abdeslam, 26, was among the attackers who killed 130 people at a rock concert, the national stadium and cafés on Nov. 13 in Paris.
Friday’ s capture of Abdeslam comes after Belgian authorities say they found his fingerprints in an apartment raided earlier this week in another Brussels neighbourhood. In that raid, a man believed to have been an accomplice of Abdeslam — Mohamed Belkaid — was shot dead, Belgian prosecutors say.