Paris terror attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam captured during raid in Brussels but many questions remain
He is thought to have served as the logistics man, renting rooms, shopping for detonators and driving at least one of the killers from Brussels to Paris.
Beardless, with short-cropped hair and a mild manner, Salah Abdeslam slipped from one world to another as easily as he slipped for four months through an international dragnet.
The fugitive who evaded several close calls with police – until he was caught on Friday in the neighbourhood where he grew up – remains perhaps the biggest mystery among the cohort of men who brazenly attacked Paris cafes and restaurants, a noted concert hall and France’s main sports stadium on November 13, killing 130 people.
He is thought to have served as the logistics man, renting rooms, shopping for detonators and driving at least one of the killers from Brussels to Paris. It remains unclear whether he was meant to become an attacker himself, as a suicide bomber, and whether he was a chameleon or a coward.
We are an open-minded family. We never had any problems with justice
Abdeslam, 26, is a French citizen who lived in the Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels, the low-income quarter of mainly Moroccan immigrant families and home to most of the at least nine attackers.
He lost one of his two brothers, Brahim, who blew himself up, and his childhood friend Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the bloodbath.
Four days after the attacks, Mohamed Abdeslam, the third brother, said the three siblings grew up normally, seemingly content with life in Europe.
“We are an open-minded family. We never had any problems with justice,” he said. “You have to understand that we have a family, we have a mom and he remains her child.”
Brothers Brahim and Salah ran a family cafe in Molenbeek – which police closed down not long before the attacks on suspicion of drug dealing there. The cafe served alcohol, forbidden in the Muslim religion, but that clearly posed no problem for the two young men. Just like the partying that Brahim’s friends said their friend did, and reports said Salah did, too.