Paris suspect in secret transfer to France
Print Edition
PARIS attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam — Europe’s most wanted fugitive until his capture in Belgium last month — was yesterday transferred to France to appear before judges who will decide how to charge him, according to the French prosecutor’s office.
Prosecutors say Abdeslam, who had been on the run for four months, was instrumental in coordinating logistics for the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people at Paris nightclubs, a music hall and a sports stadium outside the city. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility.
The quick, secret transfer surprised even Abdeslam’s lawyer in France, who rushed from Lille to join his client at the Palace of Justice, arriving in the early afternoon.
Frank Berton, who said Abdeslam “has the right to be defended,” described his client as a young man “falling apart” and ready to cooperate.
He told iTele TV that his client wants to talk. “He has things to say, that he wants to explain his route to radicalization” as well as his role in the attacks, Berton said, but not take responsibility for others.
“That means be judged for facts and acts that he committed but not for what he did not commit simply because he is the only survivor of the attacks,” Berton said.
Testimony from Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, will likely prove significant to definitively linking events of that night, which involved three teams of attackers who blew themselves up or sprayed gunfire. His brother was one of the suicide bombers.
Abdeslam’s precise role in the attacks remains a mystery. He returned from France to Belgium afterward, calling cohorts in Brussels to fetch him. However, a suicide belt bearing his fingerprints was found south of Paris and a car he had been driving was found in a northern Paris district, prosecutors said.
He was captured just four days before March 22 bombings at the Brussels airport and a metro station that killed 32 people. The Islamic State group also claimed responsibility for those attacks.
Brussels, and in particular the Molenbeek neighborhood, which has a large Muslim population, was home to many of the attackers who struck Paris. It was Abdeslam’s childhood neighborhood and he was caught not far from where he grew up.
Speculation about his role and place in the hierarchy of the attackers has been rampant. Was he a little guy and a coward or a pivotal figure in the planning and execution of the attacks?
It had been widely suspected Abdeslam pulled out of his own role as an attacker, something Paris prosecutor Francois Molins confirmed at a news conference, saying he had wanted to blow himself up but backed down.
In a surprise assessment, the suspect’s Belgian lawyer, Sven Mary, in a profile published by French daily Liberation, dismissed Abdeslam as a “little jerk among Molenbeek’s little delinquents, more a follower than a leader.”
“He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray,” Liberation quoted Mary as saying in a profile that focused on the lawyer’s career.
Abdeslam is charged with attempted murder over a March 15 shootout with police in Brussels. He was arrested three days later and police in Belgium have questioned him about any potential links to the suicide bombers in the Brussels attacks.
French Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said Abdeslam would be placed in isolation in a prison in the Pris region.
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