Free Republic

The last known survivor of the team that carried out last November’s Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, refused to talk during questioning Friday by anti-terror judges amid frustration at 24-hour video surveillance of his cell, his lawyer said. The much-awaited questioning session ended abruptly, dashing French authorities’ hopes that Abdeslam would provide clues about the Islamic State group’s strategies and what exactly happened Nov. 13.Abdeslam’s lawyer, Frank Berton, said his client invoked his right to silence. […] Abdeslam, 26, had said last month he wanted to explain his path to radicalization and his role in the Nov. 13 attacks. Berton expressed...

BRUSSELS — Salah Abdeslam, who was captured on Friday in Brussels and charged with terrorist murder over the Paris attacks in November, wants to be extradited to France, his lawyer said on Thursday. Mr. Abdeslam “wants to leave for France as quickly as possible,” the lawyer, Sven Mary, told reporters Thursday morning after a court hearing in Brussels. The decision by Mr. Abdeslam, 26, to accept extradition was a reversal of his position. He was Europe’s most wanted man until he was arrested on Friday in a raid in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where he grew up. He appears to...

Family, friends and a network of petty criminals, rather than Islamic State (Isis), hid Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam in the Molenbeek neighbourhood of Belgian capital Brussels over the course of a four-month international manhunt, French and Belgian officials have said. Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, where 130 were killed in the November 2015 attacks, has said she believed the community of Molenbeek had "undoubtedly protected" Abdeslam. Speaking on French radio, Hidalgo said the investigation into how Abdeslam had evaded police capture, despite an intensive international manhunt, would show "family support networks" and petty criminals had hidden the Belgian national...

Perhaps it’s not a body blow to ISIS itself, but the capture of Salah Abdeslam might do a great deal of damage to its operations in Europe. One question from his capture certainly remains unanswered at the moment — why was the mastermind of the Paris attacks still in Europe at all? And why did he stick around Molenbeek, which Belgian and other Western counterterrorism operatives kept under scrutiny? Salah Abdeslam, the top suspect in last year’s deadly Paris attacks, was discharged Saturday from a Brussels hospital along with a suspected accomplice and will now face official questioning and a...

Salah Abdeslam, the main fugitive from Islamic extremist attacks in Paris in November, was arrested in Belgium's capital Friday after four months at large, two French police officials told The Associated Press. They said he was arrested in a major police operation in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. Both officials are in contact with people involved in the operation and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing operation. Theo Francken, Belgium's secretary of state for asylum and migration, tweeted, "We hebben hem," which translates to English, "We got him." Francken later...

.....is shot in raid on Brussels hideout The world's most wanted man, a prime suspect in the Paris terrorist attacks, has been wounded and captured in a dramatic police raid in Brussels. Salah Abdeslam was shot in the leg by police commandos and has been arrested in the district of Molenbeek in the Belgian capital. The country's minister for asylum and migration, Theo Francken, confirmed the capture this afternoon announcing: 'We got him'. But the operation is continuing tonight and fresh gunshots were heard at about 5.30pm - an hour after Abdeslam's capture.

One frequented gay clubs; another boasted he had slept with a different woman every night on holiday. Within months these pot-smoking misfits joined Isis’s attack on the ‘capital of perversion’They often saw him in the club, the clean-shaven 26-year-old who enjoyed smoking joints and chatting with other men. He was in the gay sex bar in central Brussels as recently as one month ago, and nobody who saw him lounging comfortably there could have imagined for a moment that he was about to become the most wanted man in Europe. The handsome youth with a taste for hashish has since...