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Belgium extradites Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam to France Belgium extradites Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam to France
(about 1 hour later)
Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam, has been extradited to France from Belgium, according to Belgian federal prosecutors. The Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been extradited to France from Belgium, prosecutors in both countries say.
“I can confirm he’s been extradited,” a spokeswoman said. Abdeslam, 26, was Europe’s most wanted fugitive until his capture in Brussels on 18 March after a four-month manhunt. He is due to appear before French judges on Wednesday.
Abdeslam will appear before French magistrates on Wednesday with a view to being placed under formal investigation, the French public prosecutor said. “Salah Abdeslam has been handed over to the French authorities this morning,” Belgium’s federal prosecutors said in a statement.
The 26-year-old was Europe’s most wanted fugitive until his capture in Brussels on 18 March after a four-month manhunt. His capture came four days before separate suicide bomb attacks by Islamist militants at Brussels international airport and on a metro train killed 32 people.
Investigators have said he told them he had arranged logistics for the 13 November attacks, which killed 130 people, and had planned to blow himself up at a sports stadium in Paris but backed out at the last minute. Frank Berton, a high-profile French criminal lawyer, said he would lead Abdeslam’s defence and had visited his client for more than two hours last week in his prison cell in Belgium along with Abdeslam’s Belgian lawyer, Sven Mary.
Belgian police have also tried to question Abdeslam over his links to three suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport and metro on 22 March, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds more. Related: Paris and Brussels: the links between the attackers
Investigators say Abdeslam told them he had arranged logistics for the 13 November bombing and shooting attacks in Paris and had planned to blow himself up at a sports stadium there but backed out at the last minute.
He is suspected of having rented two cars used to transport the attackers to, and around, the French capital.
“He told me naturally that he has things to say and he will say them. He wants to talk,” Berton said.
“What counts and what matters for us as his lawyers is simply that he gets a fair trial, that he is sentenced for things he did and not things that he didn’t do. That’s vital because he is the sole survivor,” he told BFM TV.
Abdeslam’s elder brother Brahim, with whom he used to run a bar in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, was among the Paris suicide bombers, blowing himself up at a cafe.
Abdeslam may have been the 10th man referred to in an Islamic State claim of responsibility. Police found one abandoned suicide vest in a Paris suburb.
He had been held in a prison in the Belgian town of Bruges. Last week he was charged in Belgium over a shootout with police in an apartment in southern Brussels in which his fingerprints were found days before his eventual arrest.
Belgian police have arrested a number of Abdeslam’s associates, including Mohamed Abrini, wanted over the Paris attacks and also a suspected Brussels attacker.