Fugitive from Paris attacks wounded and captured after shoot-out

BRUSSELS: The most-wanted fugitive from November’s Paris attacks was arrested after a shoot-out with police here yesterday, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said.

Media reported Salah Abdeslam, the 26- year- old French suspect, was wounded in the operation as EU leaders met on the other side of the city to discuss Europe’s migration crisis. “We got him,” Belgium’s secretary of state for asylum and migration, Theo Francken, said on Twitter.

Several exchanges of gunfire rang out in the Molenbeek area – the scene of past investigations into the Paris attacks – and police officers were seen surrounding a block of flats there.

French president Francois Hollande and Belgian prime minister Charles Michel left the summit to discuss the operation, officials said.

Television footage showed black-clad security forces wearing balaclavas guarding a street. Reporters at the scene described white smoke rising from a rooftop and a helicopter hovering overhead.

Media reported two people had been arrested, a third suspect may have been involved and Abdeslam had been wounded in the leg, though there were conflicting accounts.

Belgian police had found fingerprints belonging to Abdeslam at the scene of an apartment raided on Tuesday, prosecutors said earlier.

The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office also said an Algerian killed during that earlier operation was probably one of the people French and Belgian investigators were seeking in relation to the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November. 13 that killed 130 people.

Public broadcaster RTBF said it had information that Abdeslam, whose elder brother blew himself up in Paris, was “more than likely” one of two men who police have said evaded capture at the scene before a sniper shot dead a third man who was aiming an AK47.

Other Belgian media were more cautious, however, saying only there was evidence Abdeslam had been there.

A man named Samir Bouzid has been sought since December when police issued CCTV pictures of him wiring cash from Brussels two days after the Paris attacks to a woman who was then killed in a shoot- out with police in the Paris suburb of St Denis.

She was a cousin of Abdelhamid Abbaoud, a Belgian who had fought in Syria and is suspected of being a prime organiser of the Paris attacks. Both died in the apartment in St Denis on November 18.

France’s BFM television said fingerprints were found on a glass in the apartment on Tuesday, where four police officers, including a Frenchwoman, were wounded when a hail of automatic gunfire hit them through the front door as they arrived for what officials said they had expected to be a relatively routine search.

Investigators believe much of the planning and preparation for the Paris attack was conducted in Brussels by young French and Belgian nationals. The attack strained relations between Brussels and Paris, with French officials suggesting Belgium was lax in monitoring the activities of hundreds of militants returned from Syria. – Reuters