This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/27/belgium-extradites-paris-attacks-suspect-salah-abdeslam-to-france

The article has changed 9 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
Belgium extradites Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam to France Belgium extradites Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam to France
(about 1 hour later)
The Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam has been extradited to France from Belgium, prosecutors in both countries say. Salah Abdeslam, a main suspect in the November terrorist attacks in Paris, will appear before a judge in Paris on Wednesday.
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, suspected of being the logistics mastermind behind the attacks, was transferred from Belgium, where he was arrested last month, to France early on Wednesday morning.
“Salah Abdeslam has been handed over to the French authorities this morning,” Belgium’s federal prosecutors said in a statement. He arrived in the French capital by helicopter accompanied by an elite squad of gendarmes at 9.05am and was questioned by anti-terrorist police before his court appearance at the Palais de Justice.
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.
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.
Related: Paris and Brussels: the links between the attackersRelated: 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. The man believed to be the last living member of the Islamist terrorist cell that carried out the shootings and bombings in Paris and Brussels is expected to be mis en examen, the equivalent in the French system of being charged, on alleged “links to a terrorist organisation”.
He is suspected of having rented two cars used to transport the attackers to, and around, the French capital. He is alleged to have arranged the logistics for the November attacks and to have rented and paid for several apartments used by the gunmen and suicide bombers. He left three suspects at the Stade de France, where they blew themselves up, but Abdeslam allegedly told Belgian investigators he had backed out of killing himself, dumping his explosive belt in a rubbish bin.
“He told me naturally that he has things to say and he will say them. He wants to talk,” Berton said. After the Paris attacks, Abdeslam called two friends who drove from Brussels to Paris to pick him up and take him back to Belgium, where he went into hiding.
“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. The 26-year-old French national was shot in the leg during his arrest in the Molenbeek area of Brussels on 18 March after a four-month manhunt.
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. A few days later, terrorists attacked Brussels airport and the city’s metro system. Investigators are looking into whether the bombings in the city were in revenge for Abdeslam’s arrest.
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. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the series of bombings and shootings in Paris, which killed 130 people and left 349 injured, and attacks in Brussels, where three suicide bombers killed 32 people and injured more than 300.
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. Frank Berton, Abdeslam’s defence lawyer in France, said: “We’re a democracy. Everyone has the right to a defence and Salah Abdeslam must have one.”
Belgian police have arrested a number of Abdeslam’s associates, including Mohamed Abrini, wanted over the Paris attacks and also a suspected Brussels attacker. Before his transfer to France, the lawyer told BFMTV that Abdeslam was “anxious to explain himself to a French judge as quickly as possible”. He added: “What is important is that he has a fair trial and is convicted for the things he has done and not those he has not. He will probably not express himself today. He will do so in the weeks to come.”