Austria arrests two suspects 'linked to Paris attacks'

French citizens were posing as refugees, arrested in shelter, report says

Austrian police have arrested two people with suspected links to the November Paris attacks, prosecutors said Wednesday, with an Austrian newspaper reporting the two are French citizens posing as refugees.

“Two people coming from the Middle East were arrested over the weekend,” Robert Holzleitner, a spokesman for prosecutors in Salzburg, told AFP. “Indications of a possible link to the Paris attacks are currently being investigated.”

He added that the two were arrested in a center for refugees in the western Austrian city “on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist organization.”

The Kronen-Zeitung daily reported online that the two are French and that they entered Austria in October together with members of the terror cell who carried out the November 13 attacks in the French capital that killed 130 people.

The newspaper said that they had been posing as refugees and had fake Syrian passports, having traveled up from Greece through the Balkans into Austria along with hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in recent months.

Holzleitner, the spokesman, declined to comment on the nationalities of the two people. The Austrian interior ministry and the Austrian police also declined to comment.

The Kronen-Zeitung also said that the information leading to the arrests came from a foreign intelligence agency.