France arrests suspect in Brussels Jewish museum shooting

French customs agents have arrested an armed "jihadist" from northern France who is suspected of killing four people at the Brussels Jewish Museum.

The suspect, named as Mehdi Nemmouche from Roubaix, was arrested on Friday during a chance check by customs agents searching for illicit drugs at the main Marseille bus station. He was on a coach travelling from Amsterdam to Marseille via Brussels.

Authorities said yesterday he had a Kalashnikov rifle and a pistol in his possession, identical to the weapons used in the museum attack on May 24 in which two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer and a Belgian museum employee were shot dead. The suspect also had in his bag a GoPro camera and a large quantity of ammunition. All the items in his possession have been sent to Lyon for analysis.

Nemmouche was known to French counter-terrorism police, who had placed him under surveillance after his return last year from Syria, where he was suspected of having joined Islamist fighters.

The suspect's rifle was wrapped up in a white sheet scrawled with the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an extremist group fighting in Syria, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said. He said the suspect had spent about a year in Syria.

Molins also said that Nemmouche, 29, had a criminal record, with seven convictions for crimes like attempted robbery - but nothing terrorism-related.