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 Mohamed Abrini, a Belgian thought to have helped prepare the Nov.
13 bombing and shooting attack that killed 130 people in the French
capital, was held with two others, prosecutors said. They were
trying to confirm that he was also the "man in the hat" seen with
the Brussels airport suicide bombers on March 22.
Aged 31, Abrini was seized close to the Brussels borough of
Molenbeek, where he was long known to police for petty crimes.
Earlier, police seized a man prosecutors named only as Osama K., and
who local media said was a Swede named Osama Krayem. The prosecutors
said Krayem, detained with another man, was checked by German police
in October using a fake Syrian passport in a car rented by Salah
Abdeslam, prime surviving suspect in the Paris attacks, who was
detained in Brussels three weeks ago.
Krayem is suspected of being the man seen on CCTV with a suicide
bomber before he struck the Brussels metro on March 22 and of buying
the holdalls used by the attackers that day.
The arrests mark a signal success for Belgian security services,
which have faced fierce criticism at home and abroad since
Brussels-based militants organized the attacks in Paris and, four
months later, those in the Belgian capital that killed 32 people,
four days after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam.
Interior Minister Jan Jambon, who offered to resign over the failure
to arrest one of the Brussels suicide bombers last year, tweeted
congratulations to those involved in the arrests, as did the Belgian
head of state, King Philippe.
But there was no change in the national security alert level and
Jambon added: "The struggle against terrorism goes on." Police
searched premises in western Brussels late on Friday.
Belgium has struggled to contain a threat from hundreds of young
men, many with chequered criminal histories and from the country's
substantial Moroccan immigrant community, who have traveled to
Syria. For the size of its 11 million population, Belgium has the
biggest contingent of Islamist foreign fighters.
"MAN IN THE HAT"
The arrests came a day after police issued new images of "the man in
the hat" seen on airport cameras walking through the terminal with
Brahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui.
These two would detonate the heavy bags they were pushing on
trolleys but the third abandoned his bomb and was tracked walking
for miles on CCTV back from the airport into the city, all the while
his face hidden by glasses and a floppy hat.
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Police have also been hunting a man seen with El Bakraoui's younger
brother Khalid at a Brussels metro stop shortly before the latter
blew himself up on a train at Maelbeek station.
Prosecutors did not confirm media reports that Krayem, using a
Syrian passport in the name of Naim Al Ahmed, had arrived back in
Europe from Syria last September on a refugee boat that landed on
the Greek island of Leros, off the Turkish coast. He came, reports
said, with another man carrying fake Syrian papers who was arrested
with Abdeslam in Molenbeek on March 18.
Abrini, who local media said may have spent time in Syria last
summer, has been on Europe's most wanted list since December. That
was when he was identified from security camera footage at a
motorway service station driving with Abdeslam toward Paris from
Belgium two days before the Nov. 13 attacks.
The car they were in was later used in the attacks, in which
Abdeslam's elder brother was a suicide bomber. Prosecutors also said
Abrini and Abdeslam rented an apartment that was used by several of
the militants before they struck in Paris.
Abrini, nicknamed "Brioche" for his work in a bakery, was a regular
at a Molenbeek bar run by the Abdeslam brothers and which police
shut down last September after complaints of drug deals.
Abrini's fingerprints and DNA were found in two Brussels apartments,
including the one from where three men, including the two bombers,
took a taxi to the airport on March 22. It was later found to have
been used as a bomb-making factory.
(Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop and Gabriela Baczynska;
Writing by Alastair Macdonald and Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by
Alastair Macdonald and James Dalgleish)
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