Policemen patrol a street during a police action in the Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels, Belgium, on Friday that led to the arrest of Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam (inset)
Top Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam was captured in Brussels on Friday in a raid by armed police, French police sources said.
It was not immediately clear whether Abdeslam, 26, believed to have played a key role in the November 13
attacks claimed by the Islamic State that left 130 people dead, was injured in the raid. One man was injured and another arrested in the raid in the gritty Molenbeek neighbourhood of the Belgian capital. The arrest came hours after prosecutors revealed that Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found in an apartment in another part of Brussels earlier this week following a raid in which a suspected IS militant was killed.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel held a crisis meeting after the arrest with French President Francois Hollande, who was in Brussels for a European Union summit. Belgium has been at the centre of the investigation into the Paris attacks almost from day one.
Franco-Moroccan Abdeslam fled to Brussels after the attacks and is believed to have holed up in a flat for at least three weeks.
He slipped past three police checks in France as he fled to Belgium just hours after the terror assaults, a source close to the probe said in December.
His brother Brahim, who blew himself up in the massacre, was buried in a discreet ceremony on Thursday in Brussels. Another of the Paris attackers, Bilal Hadfi, was buried quietly in the same cemetery in the northwest of the city last week.
The ringleader of the attacks, IS member Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was also from Brussels. He was killed in a raid in Paris in November.
Both had links to Molenbeek, a largely immigrant district which has been a hotbed of Islamist violence for decades.
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