Fugitive may’ve evaded Belgian police

Paris attacks suspects held in Austria ‘not French’

BRUSSELS, Dec 17, (AFP): Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam may have evaded Belgian police by hiding in a vehicle or item of furniture as they homed in on him after the massacre, Belgian media reported.

Brussels-born Abdeslam is believed to have played a central role in the Nov 13 attacks that killed 130 people and wounded hundreds of others before driving back over the border from France to Belgium hours later.

On the Sunday and Monday after the attacks, Belgian security forces staged several raids, including in Molenbeek, the Brussels district which is home to Abdeslam and has served as a haven for several jihadists in recent decades.

In one of those locations, Belgian public broadcaster RTBF said late Wednesday that investigators “detected signs during the raid that he had been there,” without sourcing its report.

“This leads to the conclusion that the suspect managed to flee before security forces intervened,” the report said. “The most likely theory is that he was smuggled out by his accomplices.”

Advantage

Under the scenario, the accomplices “took advantage of the coming and going of cars and a home removal to hide Salah Abdeslam, either in a vehicle, or perhaps in a piece of furniture,” the broadcaster said.

“It’s the top theory embraced by investigators,” it added.

Causing a media uproar, Justice Minister Koen Geens told broadcaster VTM that security forces delayed a raids of the site because of a ban on night-time searched between 9:00 pm and 5:00 am.

“I think that the federal investigators would have liked to carry out the search earlier in the night. 5:00 am in the morning was too late,” he said.

He did not say why the raid in the end began five hours after the nightly ban, at 10:00 am.

The Belgian government announced a day after the attacks that it was changing the ban on night-time raids so that they could be carried out in terrorism cases — but that this would only take effect at the beginning of next year.

France and several other European countries have similar bans on overnight police raids, a measure which is meant to guard against the abuse of police powers of arrest.

Two men held in Austria for suspected links to the Paris attacks are not French, a source close to the investigation told AFP Thursday, denying media reports about their nationality.

The two men arrested at the weekend at a refugee centre in the western city of Salzburg “are not French, but are an Algerian and a Pakistani,” the source said, asking not to be named.

Salzburg prosecutors had on Wednesday said the two had “arrived from the Middle East” with officials probing “indications of a possible link” to the Nov 13 Paris attacks.

The arrests reportedly came after a tip-off from French police and the source said Thursday that French investigators had travelled to Salzburg to question the men.

The Kronen-Zeitung tabloid, which first reported the arrests, had said the two were French and were holding fake Syrian passports.

Officials in Austria and sources in France were on Wednesday unable to confirm this.

The paper said they arrived in October together with members of the cell behind the Paris attacks as part of the huge wave of migrants who have entered Austria from the Balkans this year.

Played

Salah Abdeslam, the fugitive 26year-old French citizen thought to have played a key logistical role in the attacks, was known to have been in Austria on Sept 9.

According to the Austrian authorities, he was pulled over in a routine traffic check on his way from Hungary to Germany. With him in the car, which had Belgian number plates, were two unidentified men. They were all allowed to continue.

The Salzburger Nachrichten daily on Thursday said investigators have reconstructed Abdeslam’s journey in his hired Mercedes thanks to the car’s anti-theft tracking device.

The paper said he drove through Austria to the Hungarian-Serbian border, and was pulled over again on the return leg of the journey — this time by police in the southern German state of Bavaria.

It said he picked up two men in Hungary — Soufiane K. and Samir R. — and that both had fake Belgian passports.

Hungarian officials on Dec 3 said Abdeslam had travelled to Hungary before the attacks but did not say when.

Earlier this month, French sources

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Gelli was the grandmaster of the shad- said Abdeslam was in Hungary on Sept 17, meaning he may have made several trips in the run-up to the attacks.

Three of the nine Paris attackers have yet to be identified, including two of three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France stadium, who appear to have used fake passports to sneak into Europe.

PARIS:

Also:

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Thursday removed a photograph of the decapitated body of US journalist James Foley from her Twitter account after his parents accused her of using it for political gain.

Le Pen tweeted the images Wednesday in response to a journalist who compared her National Front (FN) party to the Islamic State jihadist group which killed Foley.

Captioned “This is Daesh” (an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group), the photographs showed Foley’s bloodied body with his decapitated head on his torso.

Speaking on Thursday, Le Pen said: “I did not know it was a photograph of James Foley. It can be accessed by anyone on Google.

“I learned this morning that his family has asked for it to be removed and of course I took it down immediately.”

Foley’s parents John and Diane said Le Pen had used the uncensored photograph of their son “shamefully” and they were “deeply disturbed”.

The freelance journalist was captured in Syria in 2012 and beheaded in August 2014.