Apartment in Brussels linked to Paris attacks
Print Edition
A BRUSSELS apartment was likely used to make bombs for the Paris attacks, and one of the plotters also hid out there after escaping a police dragnet, Belgian prosecutors said yesterday.
The prosecutors said they found Salah Abdeslam’s fingerprint in a search of the apartment on December 10, but don’t know when he last holed up there. An international manhunt is ongoing for the 26-year-old Brussels native, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
The search of the apartment also turned up three suspected suicide belts, traces of the same explosive used in the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people and other material that could be used to manufacture bombs, according to the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
Federal prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt said authorities decided to release the information after more than a month to dispel inaccuracies published by some Belgian media outlets. Refusing to disclose specifics, he said the evidence acquired in the apartment “helped us get further in the investigation.”
Van der Sypt said the third-floor apartment was likely used as a hideout after Abdeslam fled the attacks. Abdeslam, whose older brother Braham was one of the Paris suicide bombers, called for two friends to pick him up in Paris amid the bloodshed and chaos that night that left 130 people dead and hundreds injured.
“We found material to make explosives, traces of explosives and we found three belts. So you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to make the right deduction,” Van der Sypt said.
Abdeslam is believed to have played a key logistical role in the Paris carnage. A French gendarme stopped him and his two friends in their car near the border but released them. The friends are among 10 people arrested in Belgium in connection with the attacks.
Authorities now believe Abdeslam returned to the apartment, was eventually picked up by someone else “and we lost trace,” Van der Sypt said.
The apartment in the city’s Schaerbeek neighborhood had been rented under a false identity that may have been used by one of those now under arrest.
The prosecutor’s office said the three handmade belts discovered in the search of the residence in the Rue Henri Berge, a quiet residential street, “could have been intended for the transport of explosives.”
Traces of the highly volatile TATP, which was packed into the suicide vests in November, were found on a piece of cloth, Van der Sypt said, as well as other material that could be used to manufacture explosives.
He said plastic bottles cut in half and containing an unknown substance were also discovered, and are being tested by forensic specialists.
The November 13 attacks marked the height of a violent year for France that began with a January 7 assault on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.
Paris was again jolted on Thursday when a man wearing a fake explosives vest and wielding a knife ran up to a police station and was shot to death by officers standing guard.
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