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Category Archives: Belgium
More terror arrests in Belgium as government concedes missteps before attacks
The Wall Street Journal reports: Belgian police rounded up six more people they said were connected to this week’s terror attacks, as the government on Thursday acknowledged high-level counterterrorism failings.
The justice and interior ministers both offered to resign a day after Turkey disclosed it had warned Belgium last summer that it suspected Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, one of two suicide bombers at the Brussels Airport, had ties to Islamic State—to no avail.
Mr. Bakraoui and his younger brother, Khalid, both from Brussels, were known to Western intelligence and were on at least one U.S. watch list, said a U.S. official. It couldn’t be immediately learned how they were classified on the list.
While U.S. often shares names on its various watch lists, it isn’t known whether they did in this case. The Belgian government has so many people to surveil, it is difficult for them to prioritize who might be the most urgent.
Separately, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said that an investigating judge on Dec. 11 had issued international and European arrest warrants for Khalid, the subway bomber. The judge specializes in terrorism and is in charge of the Paris attack investigation in Belgium.
On Wednesday, the same prosecutor said neither brother had criminal records linked to terrorism. The office didn’t offer further details Thursday.
Prime Minister Charles Michel refused to accept the resignations of his ministers. Jan Jambon, the interior minister, told a Belgian broadcaster that Mr. Michel cited the “situation of war.”
The most urgent question for investigators is how many more members of the terror network remain at large. U.S. officials said Islamic State’s strategy in Europe includes having fighters trained in Syria tap into networks of radicalized, disgruntled youth.
The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said late Thursday that it had arrested six people and conducted searches in various Brussels neighborhoods including Schaerbeek, where at least one of the attackers lived.
In France, police also carried out counterterror raids in a Paris suburb on Thursday and detained a man who was in the “advanced stage” of planning a terrorist attack, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
No link was immediately established with the recent attacks in Brussels or in Paris on Nov. 13, he said. [Continue reading…]
How extensive is the ISIS threat inside Europe?
Rob Wainwright, chief of Europol, says that security authorities are focused on some 5,000 suspects who were radicalized in Europe and went to fight in Syria. Many of these battle-hardened fighters have now returned.
The Washington Post reports: The French newspaper Le Monde and the Belgian broadcaster RTBF reported that video monitors had captured images of another possible accomplice, who is believed to have slipped away on the Brussels subway. The report could not be immediately confirmed.
Authorities also suggest that the Brussels attackers — two of them brothers — were spurred into action as security crackdowns and raids closed in.
Days before the attacks, counterterrorism police had raided their Brussels safe houses. An ally who took part in November’s Paris carnage was shot and captured by authorities. And Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian with a thick rap sheet, wrote that he did not want to wind up in a prison cell, Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said Wednesday.
Bakraoui and his younger brother, Khalid, were among the three suicide bombers in the back-to-back strikes: tearing apart a Brussels subway car and shattering the city’s main airport terminal. At least 31 people were killed and 300 injured in the bloodiest attack on Belgian soil since World War II.
Bakraoui detonated a suitcase full of nails, screws and powerful explosives at the airport, killing himself in the process, Van Leeuw said. So did Islamic State bombmaker Najim Laachraoui, 24, who is also believed to have prepared explosives for the Paris attacks, according to an Arab intelligence official and a European intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
An unidentified man who left an even larger suitcase of explosives at the airport is believed to still be at large, he said. That suitcase did not immediately detonate, sparing Belgium even more casualties.
Laachraoui’s involvement draws the boldest line yet between the Paris attacks and those in Brussels. His DNA was found on explosives in the Paris attacks, and authorities believe that he was versed in assembling powerful explosives from ingredients readily available. His participation in two attacks suggests that the Islamic State is increasingly able to strike on European soil — although his death may also mean that he feared imminent capture by European authorities.
Terrorism experts regard bombmakers, especially those trained in handling sensitive explosives, as among the most valuable and protected members of a terrorist organization. It is highly unusual for them to participate in suicide attacks themselves. [Continue reading…]
At a moment such as this, politicians, security officials, security experts, and other commentators all want to exercise caution and avoid understating the risks of further acts of terrorism.
Public awareness of risks is obviously an essential element that helps facilitate ongoing security operations and this is not the time to encourage anyone to be less vigilant.
Nevertheless, the close ties between the Paris and Brussels attacks and the fact that the individual believed to have been the bombmaker in both attacks killed himself on Tuesday, suggests that with the possible exception of a very small number of individuals at large, nearly all the culprits in these atrocities are now either dead or in detention.
That doesn’t mean that there won’t be other groups who follow in their footsteps. That’s why the danger of further attacks is real. Even so, there often seems to be a tendency to extrapolate from specific events, wider connections that don’t necessarily pertain.
Donald Trump and other Islamophobes like to evoke images of terrorists being provided refuge inside Muslim communities — the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels has frequently been characterized as a “haven” for extremists.
Yet when the decisive break in their investigation came for Belgium police last week, it was through their discovery of an a hideaway where it was evident that the fugitives appeared to be receiving no outside support.
As the New York Times reported:
The turning point in the case came last week when the police raided an apartment about six miles from Molenbeek, seeking clues but believing it to be empty.
Instead, they were met with gunfire. They killed the gunman, Mohamed Belkaid, a 35-year-old Algerian who had already been linked to the Paris plot. But two men escaped. And when the police entered the apartment, they found large quantities of ammunition, an Islamic State flag — and Mr. Abdeslam’s fingerprints.
“There was no electricity, no water, no gas,” said Ahmed El Khannouss, the deputy mayor of Molenbeek. “He was living in catastrophically unhygienic conditions.”
That two individuals happen to cross paths in the same bar or go to the same school, might turn out to be as consequential as the connections they’ve made fighting in Syria.
Often, the small stories turn out to be as, if not more significant than the big stories. Every life is filled with the random, messy details of happenstance.
In other words, although political, sociological, and ideological lenses are all useful, we need to avoid deterministic conclusions that make terrorism appear inevitable. It isn’t. Ultimately it hinges on choices made by individuals.
The fact that European security services have as many as 5,000 suspects in their sights underlines the challenges they face in attempting to keep track of these individuals.
At the same time, this number may be misleading if it conjures an image of a hidden army scattered across the continent. Moreover, this representation itself risks empowering these individuals with a sense that they remain part of a movement, when in reality they may now be utterly isolated.
These are individuals who really deserve to be called dead-enders.
ISIS wants to sow division and make us afraid of one another
Nicolas Hénin writes: Few would have given them a second look: three men wheeling luggage trolleys through the heart of an airport in the heart of Europe. I immediately recognised Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, the stocky one in the middle. I tweeted that it was him two hours before his identity as one of the suspected suicide bombers at Brussels airport was confirmed by the authorities. El-Bakraoui’s name and picture had come up in intelligence briefings. His brother, we later discovered, killed more in his own martyrdom atrocity on the Brussels metro.
In the CCTV image they exude no obvious menace. Even the fact that two are each wearing one black glove – to hide the triggers for their detonators, investigators believe – might not have raised an alarm.
Our perception of Isis is drawn from its images: the black flag; the orange suits it condemns the condemned to wear; the executioner, face masked, knife brandished. These symbols have transferred themselves from the front pages of our newspapers and seared themselves into the minds of millions. But the jihadis, who held me hostage in Syria for 10 long months, will draw just as much satisfaction from the banal images of its three operatives in the moments before they launched yesterday’s murderous attack on Zaventem airport.
The terrorists are casually dressed, one almost drawing attention to himself in a white jacket and a dark beach hat, worn at an angle. But to study this picture is chilling, knowing the three are intending to kill and maim dozens of people – and themselves – and yet they are not stressed or anxious. That is because, for them, this is all about death. But the picture sends a message: that the enemy looks ordinary and walks among you. It is one of the goals of Isis to sow division and make us afraid of one another. That was one of the things I learned during my captivity. [Continue reading…]
Poland refuses to accept refugees after Brussels attack
Al Jazeera reports: Poland’s prime minister says his country is no longer prepared to take the 7,000 refugees it agreed to accept in negotiations with the European Union because of the deadly Brussels attacks.
Beata Szydlo said on Wednesday that she does “not see any possibility for the refugees to come to Poland” after explosions rocked the Belgian capital a day earlier, according to Polish broadcaster Superstacja.
Poland had planned to admit an initial 400 refugees this year, and the rest would be allowed in over the next three years.
Last year, thousands of Poles took to the streets and social media to promote participation in anti-refugee marches across the country, organised by far-right nationalist movements such as the National Radical Camp.
In October, President Andrzej Duda said the government should take steps to protect its citizens from refugees bringing in “possible epidemics.” [Continue reading…]
Please do not disturb Europe’s most wanted man
The Washington Post reports: According to Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens, just two days after the Paris attacks [Salah] Abdeslam [Europe’s “most wanted man”] was “likely in a flat in Molenbeek.” But because of the country’s penal code, which prohibits raids between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. unless a crime is in progress or in case of fire, police were ordered to wait until dawn to pursue him. By then, Abdeslam was nowhere to be seen. [Abdeslam was captured last Friday.]
Despite warnings that Belgium could be a target of terrorist attacks, security at the Brussels airport was inadequate. In the beginning of this year, a Belgian union expressed alarm at findings of tests run at the airport to detect bombs in carry-on luggage. In one round of tests, half the bombs were not detected, according to Christina Schori Liang, a senior fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
The inspectors also revealed that fences around the airport had holes that were not repaired for months, Liang said. The security-clearance process was found to so be lax, she added, that employees could begin working without waiting for the process to conclude. It can take up to three months.
On Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country has been a transit point for young Europeans drawn to the Islamic State, said one of Tuesday’s attackers — he did not say which — was arrested in his country last summer and deported back to Europe.
The Turkish official said the president was referring to Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who was stopped at the Syrian border. Asked whether Belgian officials were notified, the official said, “Yes, they knew.”
On Wednesday, Geens, the justice minister, confirmed that officials were aware that Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who had a record of violent crime, had been expelled by the Turks to the Netherlands after trying to enter Syria. Speaking to a local radio station, he declined to say whether officials knew he had reentered Belgium. But he seemed to suggest that the attempt to enter Syria did not indicate a special threat.
“At that moment, he was not known for terrorism, but as a criminal,” Geens said.
Analysts say Belgium’s terrorism problem goes beyond security issues and includes social divides related not only to linguistic barriers but also to incorporating waves of Muslim immigrants in recent decades. Immigrants and their children maintain that they are ostracized and find it more difficult to get jobs.
Belgian youth born outside the European Union had an unemployment rate of 43.6 percent in 2014, compared with a rate of 23.2 percent for Belgian-born youth. [Continue reading…]
How Saudi extremism found a foothold in Belgium
Ishaan Tharoor writes: A lot of ink has already been spilled on the complexity of the jihadist networks operating in Belgium, as well as the social factors — discrimination and alienation — luring some Belgian youths toward groups such as the Islamic State. It’s also worth considering, though, an older history.
Analysts point to the inroads made in Belgium by the more conservative, orthodox brand of Islam espoused by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is the consequence of actual policy. In 1978, the Saudi-backed Great Mosque of Brussels opened its doors; the elegant building and land where it sat had been a gift by Belgium’s then-king to his Saudi counterpart a decade prior.
It became the seat of Islamic activity in Belgium. A 2007 leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, published by the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, detailed how the Saudi Embassy in Brussels has continued to provide Korans to myriad mosques in the country and help pay for the upkeep of the structures. Saudi Arabia also invested in training the imams who would preach to a growing Muslim diaspora in European countries, including in Belgium.
Observers say the Salafist dogma of the Saudi-funded clerics active in many mosques in Belgium stood in contrast to the traditional beliefs of the mostly working-class Moroccan and Turkish immigrants who first arrived in the country in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The Moroccan community comes from mountainous regions and rift valleys, not the desert. They come from the Maliki school of Islam, and are a lot more tolerant and open than the Muslims from other regions like Saudi Arabia,” George Dallemagne, a Belgian politician, told the Independent last year. “However, many of them were re-Islamified by the Salafist clerics and teachers from the Great Mosque. Some Moroccans were even given scholarships to study in Medina, in Saudi Arabia.”
The majority of the Belgian nationals who have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq are thought to be of Moroccan descent.
A separate WikiLeaks disclosure — this time of classified Saudi documents — found that in April 2012 the Belgian government quietly forced Saudi authorities to remove the main director of the Great Mosque, Khalid Alabri, a Saudi Embassy employee suspected of propagating the intolerant Sunni radicalism that is shared by the extremists of the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]
Quantity of explosive found in Belgium surprises officials
The New York Times reports: Unlike ammonium nitrate, TATP is typically seen in small quantities, not in the tens of pounds. One American official who had reviewed the intelligence related to the bombs in France and the newer intelligence from Belgium said the recovery of more than 30 pounds indicated an increased capacity since the Paris attacks. And that figure did not include any explosive actually used in the bombs that killed 31 people on Tuesday.
The Belgian authorities also said they had recovered nearly 40 gallons of acetone and eight gallons of hydrogen peroxide, materials used in producing TATP. They made no mention of the acids needed as catalysts or chemicals often used to rinse TATP crystals and remove impurities.
The quantities of explosives and precursors, the American official said, raised questions about how the terrorists were able to elude detection, especially during a manhunt for Salah Abdeslam, the suspect in the Paris attacks who was arrested last week.
Making TATP typically requires meticulous, time-consuming work, adding the catalyst, drop by drop, to a mixture that must be stirred and kept cool, often with a large quantity of ice.
Without specialized equipment, little can be rushed. Adding the catalyst too quickly can lead to aggressive bubbling and rising temperatures. If the reaction gets too hot, it can cause inadvertent explosions. [Continue reading…]
Defeats in Mideast raise ISIS threat to the West
The Wall Street Journal reports: When European Islamists started streaming into Syria and Iraq a few years ago, some European counterterrorism officials viewed it as a blessing in disguise. Better to have them pulverized on a Middle Eastern battlefield, they argued, than dispersed and plotting mischief at home.
Today, that battlefield has become more dangerous than ever for Islamic State, which is reeling under U.S.-backed military campaigns in both Syria and Iraq. One consequence of this progress is that trained and battle-hardened foreign fighters from Europe are more likely to head back to home ground.
That is the alarming paradox of the U.S.-led campaign against the radical group: In the months and even years ahead, an Islamic State defeated in a conventional war may pose a far greater danger to the West than when it was focused on conquering villages in the Euphrates river valley or the hill country of Aleppo.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” warned Bruno Tertrais, senior fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris and former policy adviser at the French Defense Ministry.
“If you manage to deflate Islamic State’s narrative of inevitable expansion, this would eventually reduce its attractiveness, at least for some recruits. But in the short term, as it finds itself in difficulty on one field it will try attacking another,” Mr. Tertrais said.
In the long run, of course, protecting Europe and the U.S. from the kinds of attacks witnessed in Brussels and Paris would be impossible without strangling Islamic State in its cradle.
“The frequency and magnitude of these operations is increasing as refugees are flooding Europe and elsewhere, and as [Islamic State] recruits and brainwashes people already in Europe,” said Ayad Allawi, the former Iraqi prime minister who heads a major parliamentary bloc. “This will have to be dealt with at source, and the source is here in the greater Middle East.”
In the region, there is no doubt that Islamic State’s mantra of “persisting and advancing,” which fueled its aura of invincibility just a year ago, no longer reflects reality on the ground. [Continue reading…]
The slaughter of the innocent in Brussels
Hamid Dabashi writes: Murderous criminals commit acts of systemic violence targeting innocent people, and their kindred souls among the proto-Nazi Islamophobes pick up where their brethren have left off to perpetuate a cycle of violence.
Innocent people from Brussels to Beirut, from Paris to Istanbul, from Baghdad to San Bernardino, and around the world are then caught in between this vicious circle.
What is needed is a conceptual puncture and a categorical breakage to this vicious cycle. The slaughter of innocent people in Brussels is the extension of the slaughter of the innocent in the Islamic world, not in response to or revenge for it.
When the criminal thugs gather around ISIL’s banner and commit atrocities around the world, they present it as acts of revenge against “Western aggression”. These are not acts of revenge and retaliation. These are identical acts of murderous violence targeting identically innocent people in different sites.
The murderous outfit that calls itself ISIL is the crooked product, the diabolic extension and the ugly shadow of precisely what it is they say they are fighting. [Continue reading…]
Coordinated attacks on Brussels may signal the start of ISIS-led guerrilla warfare in the West
Christopher Dickey writes: As explosions rocked the airport and the metro in Brussels this morning, fears grew that the threat of terrorism is morphing into the threat of guerrilla war in Europe.
The attacks, which killed more than 20 people, came four days after the arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a member of the terrorist cell that attacked Paris cafés, a sports stadium, and a concert hall in November, slaughtering 130 people. On Sunday, the Belgian foreign minister warned that Abdeslam was planning a new attack.
Some reports suggest that this attack, clearly coordinated in the style of the Paris carnage, was what was in the works, and went ahead without Abdeslam. It was known that at least two of his associates were still on the run. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it was clear Europe was no longer simply the victim of a series of isolated terror attacks. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war,” he said. “We are at war.”
As French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, which carried out the Paris attacks and which presumably was involved in today’s bombings, is following a playbook written more than a decade ago: The Call for an International Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al Suri, a Syrian jihadi.
Suri knew Europe well. He had lived for a while in Britain, in the community of Arab and Muslim exiles there. His core idea was that Muslims in the West, though increasingly numerous, felt themselves isolated and under pressure, and this could be exploited to create a breakdown of society, develop insurgency, and launch a civil war where the forces of Islam eventually would be victorious. [Continue reading…]
The Brussels attacks hint at a worrying ‘iceberg’ theory about terror networks in Europe
Business Insider reports: At least 30 people were reported killed and dozens more wounded after explosions ripped through Zaventem Airport and a metro station in Brussels on Tuesday morning.
The attacks came days after Saleh Abdeslam, a suspect in last year’s Paris attacks, was arrested in the Belgian capital, which is also the de facto capital of the European Union.
Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, said on Tuesday that the Brussels attacks were in line with an “iceberg” theory of terrorist plots.
That theory purports that, just as for every iceberg seen above water, the underlying mass of a terror network and its plots are not immediately visible — or, “for every attacker, there are usually three to four additional people who helped facilitate the plot.”
“That the eight attackers in Paris used more explosive belts than ever before seen in the West suggests a sizeable European terrorist facilitation network,” Watts wrote for War on the Rocks in November.
He added: “The iceberg theory of terrorist plots suggests we should look for two, three, or possibly four dozen extremist facilitators and supporters between Syria and France. This same network is likely already supporting other attacks in the planning phase.” [Continue reading…]
Two Brussels attackers, the brothers Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, were known to the authorities
The New York Times reports: The attacks in Brussels on Tuesday were carried out by two brothers who detonated suicide bombs, Belgian officials said on Wednesday, as the police continued an intense hunt for at least one other participant in the attacks. The toll from the assaults stood at 31 dead and 270 injured.
The brothers — Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, and Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27 — were Belgian and had criminal records, officials said. But the pair had no known links to terrorism until the authorities conducted a raid on March 15 on an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels, as part of the investigation into the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and another man blew themselves up at the airport at 7:58 a.m. — in two explosions, nine seconds apart — and then Khalid el-Bakraoui carried out a suicide attack at the Maelbeek subway station around an hour later, Frédéric Van Leeuw, the Belgian federal prosecutor, said at a news conference. It was not immediately clear whether Khalid el-Bakraoui also participated in the airport attacks.
The search continued for a man who was recorded by a security camera alongside Ibrahim el-Bakraoui at the airport, who was believed to have fled.
After the attacks, a taxi driver approached the police and led them to a house on Rue Max Roos, in the Schaerbeek section of Brussels, where he had picked up three men, according to Mr. Van Leeuw. There, the authorities found about 33 pounds of the explosive material TATP — a large amount. By comparison, officials say the suicide belts used by the Paris attackers each contained less than a pound of TATP. [Continue reading…]
Following Brussels attacks, Ted Cruz says the U.S. should ‘patrol and secure’ its Muslim neighborhoods
Quartz reports: Apparently trying to one-up Donald Trump in aggressive rhetoric after attacks in Brussels today, March 22, that left at least 31 dead, Ted Cruz issued a statement calling for the US to “patrol and secure its Muslim neighborhoods.”
“For years, the West has tried to deny this enemy exists, out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods,” said the would-be Republican presidential nominee.
Cruz’s statement came after another one this morning, in which he simply vowed to fight “radical Islamic terrorism.” It also comes after his main rival Donald Trump went on a media blitz calling for the US to close its borders to Muslim immigration, describing Brussels as a “disaster city” and Belgium a “horror show.” “This all happened because frankly there’s no assimilation. They are not assimilating for whatever reason. They don’t want laws that we have, they want Sharia law, and you say to yourself, at what point, how much of this do you take?” Trump said. [Continue reading…]
Brussels attacks: A throwback to pre-9/11 terrorism
By Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham
The terrible scenes in Brussels following a terrorist attack now claimed by Islamic State are a reminder of just how vulnerable airports can be.
In the years since the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001, a clear priority of western security agencies has been to protect airlines from bombings and hijackings. And, of course, this threat is real and has been persistent.
This attack in Belgium is something of a throwback to the pre-9/11 era. The fact that it occurred in the unsecured section of a major airport is significant and will raise difficult questions for the authorities.
Brussels attacks: Were they revenge for Abdeslam’s arrest?
Jason Burke writes: Revenge strike? Evidence of a tragic combination of a new cell and incompetent security services? A last effort by the battered network of Salah Abdeslam, the logistician for last year’s Paris attacks who was arrested in Brussels on Friday? Or – given that we still have very few details of Tuesday morning’s events – none of the above?
The explosions in Brussels underline various basic and important points.
The first is that, clearly, any threat from Islamic militants to Europe may rise and fall, but does not disappear when a single figure is arrested, however much he was sought. The “major blow” struck on Friday, as senior policymakers called it, now looks less major.
The second is that both terrorists and those trying to stop them seek to keep the initiative. This has a practical and a psychological aspect. For counter-terrorist agencies, the aim is to get information fast enough to mount raids and sweep up suspects before they even have time to work out who among them has been detained and who might have talked, let alone plan a new strike. Networks quickly fall apart under such relentless pressure, as was shown in Iraq in the middle of the last decade.
For the terrorists, the aim is to show they can still terrorise, mobilise and polarise with violence. This is not so much about revenge, but simply demonstrating a continued capability. They may be down but, they are saying, they are not out. [Continue reading…]
Don’t rush to blame Molenbeek for harbouring Paris attacker
By Bill Tupman, University of Exeter
After 120 days on the run, Salah Abdeslam, accused of being part of the group that carried out the brutal attacks in Paris in November 2015, has finally been arrested.
He was found in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, where he lived and worked before the attacks. Despite countless police raids in recent months, Abdeslam managed to evade capture in his own neighbourhood.
In November 2015, he is suspected of being part of three well-organised groups of jihadists which attacked Paris, including bars, the Bataclan concert hall and the area around the Stade de France. They killed 130 people and most of the attackers also died.
Islamic State claimed a further attack in the 18th Arondissement which didn’t happen. It is not yet clear if this was to be carried out by Abdeslam.
He claims that he was going to blow himself up in the Stade de France, but changed his mind. One final attacker, Mohamed Abrini, remains on the run.
The inside story of the Paris attack
CNN reports: The night that shook Paris started with three rental cars: three cars with three teams of terrorists maneuvering through the Friday evening traffic armed with the weapons of war.
A little before 9 p.m., a Renault Clio driven by Salah Abdeslam, the Paris plotter captured on Friday in Brussels, pulled up outside the national stadium. An international soccer friendly match between France and Germany was just kicking off and 80,000 fans, including French President Francois Hollande, were already inside. Three men exited the car and headed toward the stands.
One of them — Bilal Hadfi, a young French citizen living in Belgium — can be seen on surveillance video speaking into a cell phone. The other two were Iraqis who had slipped into Europe weeks before by posing as refugees. One of the trio was dressed in a Bayern Munich jogging suit. Concealed underneath their clothes were shrapnel-filled suicide vests held together with tape.
A few miles away, a black Seat Leon weaved toward the busy cafe district of Paris. The man behind the wheel, an already notorious Belgian ISIS operative called Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was on the phone speaking to Hadfi at the stadium to make sure everything went according to plan. In the passenger seats, two of his childhood friends, Chakib Akrouh and Saleh Abdeslam’s older brother, Brahim, clutched their Kalashnikovs, readying themselves. [Continue reading…]