Paris attacks:
Suspect said to plot new operations from Brussels.
BRUSSELS — The top suspect in last year’s Paris attacks told investigators after he was captured that he was planning new operations from Brussels and possibly had access to several weapons, Belgium’s foreign minister said Sunday.
Salah Abdeslam had said that “he was ready to restart something from Brussels, and it’s maybe the reality,” Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said.
Reynders gave credence to the suspect’s claim because “we found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons in the first investigations, and we have seen a new network of people around him in Brussels.”
Abdeslam, captured Friday in a police raid in Brussels, was charged Saturday with “terrorist murder” by Belgian authorities. He is a top suspect in the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.
Abdeslam was wounded during the raid, and a senior Belgian police official said he was shot in the leg as he ran toward officers outside an apartment in the Molenbeek neighborhood.
Speaking to security experts at a German Marshall Fund conference in Brussels, the foreign minister said “we have found more than 30 people involved in the terrorist attacks in Paris, but we are sure that there are others.”
Reynders urged European intelligence, law enforcement, and border authorities to exchange more information to help track the suspects down.
Interpol also has called on European countries to be vigilant at their borders, saying Abdeslam’s accomplices may try to flee after his capture. The international police agency recommended closer checks at borders, especially for stolen passports. Many of the Nov. 13 attackers and accomplices traveled on falsified or stolen documents
Abdeslam’s Belgian lawyer, meanwhile, threatened to launch legal action Monday against a French prosecutor, accusing him of breaching the confidentiality of the investigation into the Paris rampage.
Sven Mary told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF that part of the news conference given Saturday by Paris prosecutor Francois Molins “is a violation. It’s a fault, and I cannot let it go unchallenged.”
Molins said Abdeslam, 26, told Belgian officials he had “wanted to blow himself up at the Stade de France” as a suicide bomber but that he backed out at the last minute.
France is seeking Abdeslam’s extradition for trial there, but Mary said he would fight any attempt to hand over his client and that investigators have much to learn from the suspect, who was born in Belgium but has French and Moroccan nationality.
“He is cooperating, he is communicating, he is not insisting on his right to silence. I think it would be worthwhile now to give things a bit of time ... for investigators to be able to talk to him,” Mary said.