Belgian police round up suspects in Paris, Brussels attacks
Arrests come a day after Belgium asks for help in tracking down 'the man in the hat' in connection with airport bombing
Belgian authorities said Friday that several arrests have been made in relation to the Brussels attacks, one day after they called on the public to help look for a key suspect who was involved in the March 22 bloodshed that killed 32 people.
The prosecutor’s office said Friday it made “several arrests” but refused to provide more information. Meanwhile, a police source told AFP on Friday that a suspect in the November 2015 Paris attacks was arrested, after a Belgian television station said he was detained in a Brussels suburb.
The police source gave no details about the location or circumstances of Mohamed Abrini’s arrest, although VRT television said it took place in the Anderlecht district of Brussels, home to several other suspects linked to the Paris attacks.
“The federal prosecutor confirms that there have been several arrests in the course of the day in connection with the attacks on the airport and metro,” a statement from the federal prosecutor’s office said.
“For the moment, it is impossible to say more. Later, we will give more information in a statement or at a press conference,” it added.
Abrini is the last identified suspect still at large from the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris which killed 130 people. He is a 31-year-old Belgian petty criminal and is believed to have traveled early last summer to Syria where his younger brother died in 2014 in the Islamic State group’s notorious francophone brigade.
He has been on the run since the attacks but never resurfaced after the emergence of surveillance video placing him in the convoy with the attackers headed to Paris. He had ties to Abdelhamid Abbaoud, the ringleader of the Paris attacks who died in a police standoff on Nov. 18.
Belgian authorities on Thursday launched a fresh appeal to the public for information on the third suspect, the “man in the hat,” in the Brussels Airport suicide bombings that killed 16 people.
Belgian Federal Prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt said that authorities were appealing primarily to people who might have filmed or photographed the man. He was seen with the two suicide bombers who died in the March 22 attacks. A subsequent explosion at Brussels’ Maalbeek subway station killed another 16 people the same day. The attacks, and those in Paris in November, were claimed by the Islamic State terror group.