Belgians find elusive ‘man in the hat’ from airport video
Belgium confirms arrest of ‘man in the hat’ at airport bombing
(35 minutes later)
BRUSSELS — After nearly three weeks of frantic searching, Belgian authorities announced Saturday they had finally identified the elusive “man in the hat” spotted alongside the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up at Brussels Airport: It was Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini.
PARIS — The Belgian federal prosecutor confirmed Saturday that Mohamed Abrini — who was arrested Friday afternoon — was the “man in the hat” captured in surveillance footage alongside two suicide bombers at Brussels Airport on March 22.
Belgium’s Federal Prosecution Office said the recently detained Abrini — the last identified suspect at large from the deadly Nov. 13 Paris attacks — had also confessed to being the vest- and hat-wearing man linked to the Brussels bombers whose image had been widely circulated by authorities.
Abrini had been at large since the Brussels attacks, which killed 32 and injured hundreds more at the airport in Zaventem and a metro station close to the headquarters of the European Union. Footage showed him calmly walking out of the airport and into the city, where he disappeared.
“After being confronted with the results of the different expert examinations, he confessed his presence at the crime scene,” they said in a terse statement.
He was arrested Friday in the Schaerbeek section of Brussels, not far from the apartment where he and his collaborators left for the airport on the morning of the attacks.
The revelation that a Paris attacks suspect escorted two of the Brussels bombers to their deaths at the city’s airport is the strongest sign yet that the Islamic State attackers who brought mayhem to both European cities — killing a total of 162 people — were intimately linked.
“After being confronted with the results of the different expert examinations, he confessed his presence at the crime scene,” the federal prosecutor said in a statement. “He explained having thrown away his vest in a garbage bin and having sold his hat afterwards.”
Abrini, 31, was one of four suspects charged Saturday with “participating in terrorist acts” linked to the March 22 Brussels bombings that killed 32 people and wounded 270 others at the airport and in the city’s subway.
Abrini was also a significant actor in the attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, which killed 130 and injured hundreds more in a coordinated series of shootings and suicide bombings at a stadium, concert hall and restaurants across the French capital.
The prosecutors said Abrini, a Belgian-Moroccan petty criminal who was detained Friday in a Brussels police raid, threw away his vest in a garbage bin and sold his hat after the March 22 bombings.
According to European investigative files obtained by The Washington Post, Abrini ferried fellow terrorists back and forth across the French-Belgian border in the days leading up to the attacks. He was seen on camera with Brahim Abdeslam, who detonated a suicide bomb outside a Paris cafe, and with Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested in Brussels on March 18.
Prosecutors did not respond to calls seeking further details. A legal representative for Abrini could not be immediately located for comment Saturday night.
The documents also suggest that Abrini probably traveled from Europe to Syria and back, via Turkey, in the months before the November attacks.
Surveillance footage placed Abrini in the convoy with the attackers who headed to Paris ahead of the Nov. 13 massacre that left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded in the French capital.
In addition to Abrini, suspects identified as Osama K., Herve B.M. and Bilal E.M. have been charged with “terrorist murder” and participating in the “activities of a terrorist group,” the prosecutor’s office said Saturday.
Abrini was a childhood friend of Brussels brothers Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, both suspects in the Paris attacks, and he had ties to Abdelhamid Abbaoud, the Paris attackers’ ringleader who died in a French police raid shortly afterward. Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up in the Paris bombings while Salah Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels on March 18 — four days before the attacks there — after a four-month manhunt.
Despite these arrests, Belgium’s Interior Minister Jan Jambon was quick to point out that more terrorists could still be at work in the small nation that has become a hotbed for radical Islamist activity in Europe.
Abrini’s fingerprints and DNA were not only in a Renault Clio used in the Paris attacks but also in an apartment in the Schaerbeek neighborhood of Brussels that was used by the airport bombers.
“There are perhaps other cells that are still active on our territory,” Jambon told Belgium’s RTL television network on Saturday.
Abrini was also believed to have traveled to Syria, where his younger brother died in 2014 in the Islamic State’s Francophone brigade.
Belgium remains on high alert.
One European security official told The Associated Press that Abrini made multiple trips to Birmingham, England, last year, meeting with several men suspected of terrorist activity. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide details about the investigation.
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Abrini and three other men — identified as Osama Krayem, Herve B. M. and Bilal E. M. — were all charged by Belgian authorities earlier Saturday with participating in “terrorist murders” and the “activities of a terrorist group” in relation to the attacks. Two other suspects arrested in the last couple of days were released “after a thorough interrogation,” the prosecutors said in a statement.
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Osama Krayem, identified by prosecutors only as Osama K., is known to have left the Swedish city of Malmo to fight in Syria. The prosecutor’s office accuses him of being the second person at the March 22 attack on the Brussels subway station that killed 16 people and of being at a shopping mall where the luggage used in the airport bombings was purchased.
Krayem had earlier been identified posting photos from Syria on social media, according to Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College.
“He also tried to recruit people in Malmo,” Ranstorp told The Associated Press.
Swedish officials had no immediate comment on the suspect.
An African link also emerged Saturday; prosecutors described Herve B. M. as a Rwandan citizen arrested at the same time as Krayem and accused him of offering assistance to both Abrini and Krayem.
There was no immediate comment from the Rwandan government, but the African nation arrested several people on suspicion of IS links in January.
The developments Saturday were rare successes for Belgian authorities, who have been pilloried for mishandling leads in the bombings investigation. But despite multiple arrests, Brussels remains under the second-highest terror alert, meaning an attack is still considered likely.
“There are perhaps other cells that are still active on our territory,” Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon told RTL television on Saturday.
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Satter reported from Paris. Paisley Dodds in London, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Ignatius Ssuuna in Kigali, Rwanda and Geert Vanden Wijngaert in Brussels contributed to this report.
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