BRUSSELS — A keen-eyed witness who spotted a pale, slender figure fleeing an apartment near a Brussels auto plant one week ago set in motion a vast police dragnet that within 72 hours led to the capture of Salah Abdeslam, the most wanted man in Europe.
Another key helper in leading authorities to the hideout of their high-value quarry was a pallbearer at the burial of the fugitive’s brother.
Abdeslam is being held in a Belgian high-security prison, with France seeking his extradition so he can stand trial for his alleged role in the Nov. 13 rampage of gunfire and suicide bombings in Paris that killed 130 people.
The 26-year-old Frenchman was arrested Friday after being run to ground by investigators in the same gritty Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels where he grew up.
The fugitive’s luck began to run out on the afternoon of March 15, when a six-member police team showed up to search an apartment believed linked to the Paris attackers.
The joint Belgian-French search party thought the residence near an Audi factory in south Brussels was vacant because the water and power had been turned off for weeks. But as they opened the door, they were fired on from inside by at least two people wielding a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a riot gun. In the melee, four police officers were slightly wounded, and two occupants of the apartment managed to slip away, reportedly via the rooftop.
One witness got a good enough look at one of the escapees to describe him to a police sketch artist, said Ahmed El Khannouss, the first deputy mayor of Molenbeek.
The portrait that resulted “bore a very strong resemblance to Salah Abdeslam,” El Khannouss said. Forensic scientists found Abdeslam’s fingerprints in the apartment.
There also was the body of a suspected Abdeslam accomplice who was shot and killed by a police sniper as the gunman prepared to fire on police from a window, along with a Kalashnikov, a stockpile of ammunition, and a banner of the Islamic State.
What Belgian authorities didn’t disclose, said former French intelligence agent Claude Moniquet, was that they also recovered cellphones that quickly told them who the apartment’s occupants had contacted.
Now that his cover had been blown, “the working assumption of the police was that Abdeslam would go to a place he knew,” said Moniquet, director of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. Most likely, that meant Molenbeek, the area where Abdeslam grew up with several of the Paris attackers.
Abdeslam’s older brother Brahim, one of the Paris suicide bombers, was buried Thursday in a Brussels cemetery after French investigators finally released his remains to the family.
Photos published in the Belgian press showed one of the mourners who carried Brahim Abdeslam’s casket. Identified as Abid Aberkan, he is related to the Abdeslam family, El Khannouss said.
According to Moniquet, “from that time on, they immediately focused on Aberkan. By Thursday night, they were absolutely sure that he (Abdeslam) was hiding in the apartment of Aberkan’s mother in Molenbeek.”
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