Funeral of brother led police to Abdeslam’s hideout

Police have found the DNA of a newly identified ­suspect on explosives used in last year’s Paris attacks.

A man believed to be connected to a key suspect in the November 2015 Paris attacks Salah Abdeslam, is detained by police during a raid in Brussels.

Police have found the DNA of a newly identified ­suspect on explosives used in last year’s Paris attacks, as it can be ­revealed a funeral led to the arrest of Europe’s most wanted man.

Belgian investigators named a suspected accomplice in the ­November 13 attacks as Najim Laachraoui, previously known by the false name of Soufiane Kayal.

Laachraoui used the alias to travel to Hungary in September with Salah Abdeslam — arrested in Brussels on Friday and the last known survivor of 10 people who carried out the wave of shootings and suicide bombings that left 130 people dead.

Laachraoui is also believed to have travelled to Syria in February 2013. Traces of DNA from the 24-year-old were found on the explosives used in Paris attacks, a source close to the French investigation said.

Laachraoui is one of two suspects still wanted over the Paris attacks, along with ­Mohamed Abrini, who became friends with Abdeslam when they were teenagers.

GRAPHIC: Paris attacks

Prosecutors said Laachraoui’s DNA had been found at an apartment used by the attackers in ­Auvelais, near the central Belgian city of Namur, which he had ­rented under a false name. Traces were also found at another ­suspected hide-out in Schaarbeek, a district of Brussels.

He used the same false name at the border between Austria and Hungary on September 9 when he was travelling with Abdeslam and Mohamed Belkaid, killed last Tuesday in a police raid in the southern Brussels suburb of Forest. Abdeslam fled the apartment, in which prosecutors found two detonators, along with a large cache of weapons.

The 26-year-old Frenchman was run to ground by investi­gators in the gritty Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels where he grew up. Much remains unclear about Abdeslam’s movements in the four months he managed to elude authorities multiple times, including three French police checks on November 14 as he fled to Brussels.

The fugitive’s luck began to run out last Tuesday afternoon when a six-member police team showed up to search the Forest apartment. The Belgian-French search party thought the flat near an Audi factory was vacant ­because the water and power had been turned off for weeks, but as soon as they opened the door, they were fired on by at least two people wielding a Kalashnikov and a riot gun.

In the melee, four officers were slightly wounded, and Abdeslam and another occupant slipped away via the rooftop.

One witness had a good enough look at one of them 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”, whose fingerprints were found in the flat.

Also found was the body of Belkaid — the 35-year-old Algerian shot dead by a police sniper as he prepared to fire on police from a window — along with a Kalashnikov, a stockpile of ammunition, and an Islamic State banner.

Abdeslam’s older brother Brahim, one of the Paris suicide bombers, was buried on Thursday in a Brussels cemetery after French investigators released his remains to the family. A score of mourners came to the funeral, as did police. El Khannouss said identity papers were checked.

Former French intelligence agent Claude Moniquet said police “interrogated people, took information on their phones”.

One of mourners who carried Brahim’s casket was Abid Aberkan, a relation of the Abdeslams.

El Khannouss believes some mourners were tailed by authorities as they left the cemetery. In any event, 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.”

That apartment is at No 79 Rue des Quatre-Vents — a rundown, three-storey dwelling. The ground-floor windows are boarded up and the basement windows are barred.

About 4.30pm on Friday, the usually quiet neighbourhood was swarming with heavily armed police, said 32-year-old Aman, who lives across the street. She watched through the curtains of her front window as Abdeslam bolted from the front door of No 79, turned left, and was shot in the leg by a SWAT team that had sealed off the street. “Police said to stop. When he didn’t, they shot him,” Aman said.

The officers may not have ­realised who they had captured at first.

According to El Khannouss, Abdeslam was so pale and had lost so much weight, police didn’t immediately recognise him.

AFP, AP