The suspected planner of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, the most-wanted man in Europe, is said to have stopped off in a cafe in Brussels the day after the killings.
The specter of the chief suspect in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, taking his ease in a public place in the Belgian capital is problematic for authorities who already let him slip through their net when he departed France.
The information comes from a laywer for Ali Oulkadi, the man who picked up Abdeslam and two friends at a Brussels subway stop the day after the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people.
‘For my client, it was a shock’
The lawyer, Olivier Martins, told Belgian news organizations that his client, Oulkadi, got a call November 14 to pick up a friend at the Bockstael subway station in Laeken, a suburb northwest of Brussels.
“He did not know it was Salah and did not recognize him immediately when he arrived because he was wearing a cap,” Martins said. “In the car, Salah told him that his brother, Brahim, had killed people in Paris and had blown himself up. For my client, a childhood friend of the two brothers, it was a shock, He could not understand it and could not think clearly.”
On the way back to the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, the group stopped in a cafe, the lawyer said.
Belgium holding six in connection with Paris attacks
The two people who traveled from Paris with Abdeslam — Mohammed Amri, 27, and Hamza Attou, 21 — have been ordered held by Belgian authorities. Oulkadi has been detained.
In all, Belgium — whose capital city is said to be a hotbed of European jihadism — is holding six people in connection with the attacks in Paris.
Martins said Oulkadi had done nothing wrong.
“He was in Brussels during the evening of Friday, November 13th, has no criminal record and is absolutely not radicalized,” Martins said. “When he learned that Salah was wanted, he should have gone to the police and told his story, but he was scared and didn’t get the right advice at the time.
“You’re not going to tell me that driving someone from one location to another around Brussels means that you’re automatically implicated in the terrorist attacks,” Martins said.