The most likely version of the explosions in Brussels is that ISIS members avenged their henchman on suspicion of the Paris terrorist attacks on November 13 and 14, when 130 people were killed.
Not much is known about Salah Abdeslam. He is 26 years old, born and raised in Brussels in a family of Moroccan immigrants. Lived in the Muslim migrant area of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean. According to the British newspaper The Independent, Abdeslam worked as a railway mechanic for a year; in his native area he was known as a reveler who loved to smoke and drink, which is generally prohibited by Islam. Abdeslam's childhood friend told reporters that he was interested in football and motorcycles.
At the same time, Abdeslam's best friend was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who played a decisive role in the radicalization of Salah.
Since 2010, Salah and Abdelhamid have committed several crimes, for example, they were arrested for possession of psychotropic substances and burglary. Abdelhamid then fled to Syria and returned to Brussels in 2014 as a member of ISIS.
Salah succumbed to the influence of his friend. During the day he did not work in a prestigious place - he sold coffee on his face, but in the evenings in The underground with other terrorists was planning explosions in Europe. Fortunately, not all of them have been implemented.
They started talking about Salah after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13-14, when a “suicide belt” with his fingerprints was found in a Paris suburb. During the four months of investigation, the police established that Salah planned and developed a plan for attacks on the French capital. And it was he who drove the suicide bomber to the Stade de France stadium. He himself was supposed to die by blowing himself up in the 18th district of Paris, but the terrorist attack was foiled.
Investigators followed the trail of Salah Abdeslam, conducting raids and searches in cities in France and Belgium. But he was always a day, or even a couple of hours ahead, leaving law enforcement officers with only fingerprints. And so, in an apartment in the Brussels quarter of Molenbeek, near the site of the recent EU summit, he was detained on March 18 in a so-called “social” apartment at number 79 rue Quatre-Van.
Then the whole block was cordoned off by the police, helicopters were circling in the sky, and large special forces were deployed. They took “terrorist No. 1” in battle. He fired back from a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The stormtroopers lightly wounded him in the leg, disarmed him and took him in handcuffs to the police station under the cover of several special forces teams. It is noteworthy that all this happened ten kilometers from the EU-Turkey summit, where the issue of security and the fight against terrorism was discussed.
Five people were detained along with Salah: someone with the pseudonym Monir Ahmed Alaaj, Amin Chukri, Abid A and a woman named Jamila M.
The media suggested that these people could be members of a family that helped the terrorist hide for four months. But in the end, only Monir Ahmed Alaaj, also known as Ahmet Alaaj, who was suspected of organizing the terrorist attacks, was arrested. The rest were released.
Abdeslam was held in an underground cell in the Belgian city of Bruges pending extradition to France. The Belgian government approved his extradition to France.
After his arrest, Abdeslam admitted that he was in Paris at the time of the attacks and wanted to blow himself up at the Stade de France, but then changed his mind. According to him, he was planning terrorist attacks in his native Brussels. There is a bold suggestion that Abdeslam planned the explosions, but he wanted to lower the city into hell later. However, after the arrest, members of his group were afraid that Abdeslam would reveal his identity and passwords to the police and decided to act.
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A court in Brussels has rendered a verdict in one of the cases involving “terrorist No. 1” Salah and his accomplice Sufian Ayari. Abdeslam was arrested on March 18, 2016 in the Brussels district of Molenbeek. Earlier, during the storming of an apartment in the Fore commune, where three members of a terrorist group were located, the police encountered armed resistance: Abdeslam and his accomplices fired back with machine guns. Law enforcement officers eliminated one of the terrorists, but two managed to escape. Three days later, police again found Abdeslam along with an accomplice, Soufiane Ayari, and this time were able to capture them.
The trial of Abdeslam and Ayari began in February 2018. The investigation did not have formal evidence that Abdeslam himself directly fired at the fire, but the court agreed with the prosecution’s argument that involvement in a terrorist organization made him an accomplice in the shootout.
Abdeslam refused to personally participate in the trial in Belgium and was represented by a Belgian lawyer. The terrorist himself is now in prison in France, where he is awaiting trial on the main charge of participation in the Paris terrorist attacks.
On April 23, the Palace of Justice in Brussels was carefully guarded: solid metal fences were installed at the entrance along the perimeter, and police and military personnel were on duty. As noted, Abdeslam's lawyer argued that he should be acquitted due to a procedural error, but this did not affect the court's decision.
“The court found defendant Salah Abdeslam and [his accomplice] Sufyan Ayari guilty of armed resistance to police officers and attempted murder of police officers under aggravating circumstances. The court sentenced the accused to 20 years in prison,” the verdict says.
Since his arrest, Abdeslam has spoken to investigators only once. In March 2018, he decided to acquit a driver he knew.
The testimony concerned Ali Ulkadi, who was suspected of giving Abdeslam a lift to the Brussels commune of Skarbek the day after the terrorist attack in Paris. Ulkadi, through his lawyer, asked Abdeslam to speak in his defense, explaining that “his mother is dying, and he can no longer bear a prison sentence.” Abdeslam told the judge that he “never asked for help from this suspect.” However, he never said a word about his participation in the terrorist attacks.
The investigation believes that Abdeslam was part of a Paris-Brussels terrorist cell that carried out terrorist attacks in the French and Belgian capitals.
The terrorist attacks in Paris and its suburb of Saint-Denis took place on November 13, 2015. Three coordinated groups of terrorists carried out a series of attacks: bombings near the Stade de France stadium in Saint-Denis, shootings of patrons of several restaurants, and a massacre at the Le Bataclan concert hall, where about 100 people were taken hostage. In total, 130 people became victims of the terrorist attack, and more than 350 were injured.
According to investigators, Abdeslam was in Paris on the day of the terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015, but returned to Brussels that night. His suicide belt either did not work, or he himself did not detonate the explosive device at the last moment. According to the investigation, Abdeslam personally shot the visitors of the cafe, near which his brother Ibrahim blew himself up. In addition, the car used by the terrorists was rented in his name. From the time of the attacks until his arrest in March the following year, the militant was hiding with friends in Brussels.
Abdeslam's arrest in 2016 prompted the remaining members of a Belgian terrorist cell linked to extremism to rush to complete preparations and carry out another major attack. On March 22, 2016, two explosions occurred at Brussels International Airport. Another explosion occurred on a train at Malbec station in the Brussels metro. As a result, 31 people died and about 200 were injured.
Let us note that throughout the history of its existence, IS has almost never claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack if its perpetrator survived.
This was done, firstly, so as not to burden the position of the militant, and secondly, so as not to discredit the group in the event that one of those involved in the terrorist attack was subsequently arrested and began to cooperate with the investigation (which would greatly damage the reputation of the terrorists). In the case of the Paris and Brussels attacks, IS claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the arrests of Abdeslam and Ayari have meant that their names are largely absent from the group's propaganda.
The terrorist attack on Paris shook the world community. Rafale planes of the French Air Force have been bombing the capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate for several days in a row, politicians from the leading countries of the world are discussing the contours of a future anti-terrorism program, and Europeans are preparing to live in conditions of war. Lenta.ru studied the biographies of the people responsible for the largest terrorist attack in the history of the Fifth Republic and found out that not all of them became jihadists not because of a good life.
"The Blacksmith of Jihad" Abdelhamid Aboud
“All my life I have seen the blood of Muslims shed. Allah chose me to go to Europe and terrorize the crusaders who are waging war against the faithful,” said alleged Paris attacker Abdelhamid Aboud in an interview with Dabiq magazine, published by the Islamic State (IS).
His photograph was first distributed among security forces in the Belgian city of Verviers on January 16, 2015. Then special forces surrounded the militants near the city station and killed two jihadists during a shootout, but the alleged leader of the cell, Abaoud, managed to escape and flee to Syria, where he fought in the ranks of the Islamic State.
He was later credited with a role in preparing foiled terrorist attacks on French churches in April and in Amsterdam-Paris in August.
In an interview with the propaganda magazine Dabiq, Aboud boasted of how easily he had escaped to Syria: “I was stopped by a policeman who looked at my face, compared it to a photograph and let me go because he didn’t find a resemblance! This proves that Muslims do not need to fear Crusader intelligence, its image has been exaggeratedly inflated.”
According to security officials, the 27-year-old terrorist grew up in Molenbeek, one of the most problematic areas of the Belgian capital. Almost 100 thousand people live on an area of six square kilometers, a significant part of whom come from the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East. The average age of Molenbeek residents is only 34 years. The unemployment rate is almost three times higher than the general Belgian one: every third resident does not have a permanent source of income. Among young people, the situation is even worse - 42 percent of young people do not work. Moreover, a quarter of all Belgian mosques are concentrated in Molenbeek.
This “forge of jihad” was home to terrorists who attacked soldiers in Afghanistan; the alleged mastermind of the Madrid attack that killed 241 people; the perpetrator of the failed attack on the Amsterdam-Paris fast train and the militant who attacked the Jewish Museum in Brussels. It was here that the weapons used in the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 were stored. "Molenbeek has the largest concentration of foreign fighters in Europe," Liesbeth van der Heide, an expert at the Center for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at Leiden University, told BBC News.
Recidivist baker Omar Ismail Mostefai
Mostefai was among the terrorists who attacked the Bataclan concert hall. Born in the poor Paris suburb of Courcouron, he was convicted eight times of minor crimes between 2004 and 2010, but did not receive a prison sentence. After 2010, he moved to Chartres, about 100 kilometers from the capital, where he worked as a baker and played football in his spare time.
At the same time, he visited Syria and Algeria - in 2013 he entered Turkey, but the authorities had no information about leaving the country. Ankara notified Paris about the suspicious young man, but, according to an unnamed BBC News source, did not receive a response to its request.
Kamikaze defector Sami Amimur
Amimur blew himself up during an attack on the Bataclan. He was born in France and lived in the Parisian suburb of Drancy. Until 2012 he worked as a bus driver in Paris. When it became known that he was planning to go to jihad in Yemen, he was charged with terrorism and placed under judicial supervision. However, authorities soon lost track of Amimura and issued an international warrant for his arrest. The newspaper interviewed his father in December 2014 after he traveled to Syria and unsuccessfully tried to persuade his son to return to France.
The media note that French intelligence services did not detect Amimur’s return on the eve of the terrorist attacks. After the attack on Paris, three of Amimura's relatives were detained by the police.
Jihadist disguised as a refugee Ahmad Almohammed
Almohammed detonated the explosives attached to his belt during the attack at the Stade de France. A passport in his name was found at the crime scene, but experts suggested that the document was fake. According to the Serbian newspaper Blic, a similar passport was used to register another migrant, suggesting that both men purchased the documents from the same manufacturer.
French prosecutors confirmed that Syrian-born Almohammed arrived in Europe disguised as a refugee via the Greek island of Leros, where he was fingerprinted and photographed on October 3. In an interview with BBC News, one of the officials who met the migrants noted that the man seemed suspicious and withdrawn, and said that he would have reported him to the competent authorities if their representative had been on the scene.
Charlie Hebdo opponent Bilal Hadfi
Bilal Hadfi also took part in the attack on the stadium. He was born in France and lived in Belgium. According to Belgian intelligence, in the spring of 2014, Hadfi went to fight in Syria under the banner of IS. The Daily Mail published a selection of photographs from his Facebook page. According to people who knew Hadfi, he became interested in politics in high school. He stopped listening to music, considering it “haram” (radical Islamists ban musical instruments - approx. "Tapes.ru") and openly spoke out in support of the Nigerian terrorists Boko Haram.
His schoolteacher became concerned about Bilal's well-being after he openly approved the shooting of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo: "He said it was right because the magazine insulted his religion." About a week after the shooting of the editorial office, Hadfi finally left for Syria.
Islamist with brilliant education Salah Abdeslam
A Volkswagen Polo car was rented in the name of Salah Abdeslam, which was found next to the Bataclan; he also ran a cafe in the center of Paris. According to the Associated Press, shortly after the attacks, police stopped a car containing Abdeslam and two other men near the Belgian border, but they were released after checking their documents. It is not reported whether information about the rented car had already been published. According to BFMTV, the Belgian police knew about Abdeslam's extremist inclinations.
Salah Abdeslam was born in the notorious Belgian region of Molenbeek. “He studied hard and was well educated. We studied at the same school and played football together,” Belgian Abdel bin Alal said about his friend in an interview with The Independent. According to him, a month before the terrorist attack, he communicated with him and did not notice anything unusual. “He wasn’t a bad person, I don’t know what happened to him. When I saw his photo, I exclaimed: “Come on, really, or what?!” This guy!” a childhood friend of the suspect told BBC News.
Local hero Ibrahim Abdeslam
Salah's brother Ibrahim Abdeslam exploded near a cafe attacked by Salah's brother. Police reported that several criminal cases were filed against Ibrahim Abdeslam in 2010-2011. He was suspected of collaborating with the alleged organizer of the attacks, Abdelhamid Aboud. “The investigation sees a connection with Verviers,” wrote the Dutch newspaper De Standaard.
Ibrahim grew up in Molenbeek, as did his brothers Salah and Mohammed. He owned a family bar in the area, which was managed by Salah. The establishment was closed because customers smoked marijuana there. Neighbors and acquaintances considered Ibrahim a hero - in October 2014, he saved five children from a burning house. “I am grateful to Ibrahim for saving my children, but I cannot understand his actions in Paris,” their father said. Ibrahim's mother stresses her son's actions.
Of the three Abdeslam brothers, only Mohammed survived - after the terrorist attack, the police interrogated him, but he had an alibi: on the day of the attack, he was renovating a bar in the French city of Lille.
The Paris terrorist attacks once again showed that in addition to uninvited guests from the war-torn countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Europe is also threatened by its own, “home-grown” extremists and jihadists, born and raised in the Old World. Why do some of them consider the ideals of jihad more important than national identity and the norms of a civilized society? The future of Europe, if not the whole world, largely depends on whether the correct answer to this question is found.