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Belgium 'bungled Abdeslam's arrest' two days after Paris attacks due to law banning overnight raids

Police failed to arrest Salah Abdeslam, Europe's most wanted man, after locating him in Molenbeek two days after the Paris attacks due to a legal loophole over searching premises between 11pm and 5am Rushed job? The arrest of Salah Abdeslam may have prompted the Brussels bombers to act while they still could By Henry Samuel, Paris and Justin Huggler, Berlin

3:27PM GMT 16 Dec 2015


Belgian secret services located Europe’s most wanted man to a Brussels flat two days after the Paris attacks but bungled his capture because they were not allowed to raid the premises between 9pm and 5am, according to reports.

Salah Abdeslam, who was in Paris at the time of the November 13 attacks that killed 130 and whose brother blew himself up, is known to have returned to Belgium the following day as he was identified during a routine road check but allowed to leave.

An explosive vest he is thought to have worn in Paris was found discarded in a rubbish bin.

But despite a massive manhunt during which Brussels was placed under maximum alert over an “imminent” terror attack, Abdeslam has evaded capture. Investigators found syringes in two hotel rooms outside Paris which had been booked in the name of Salah Abdeslam  Photo: AFP/Le Point

On Wednesday, Koen Geens, the Belgian justice minister, told Het Laatse Nieuws that Abdeslam was “likely in a flat in Molenbeek (his home town outside Brussels) two days after the Paris attacks.”

However, he said that because under the country’s penal code, no raids can take place between 9pm and 5am unless a crime is in the process of being committed or in case of fire, the police had to wait until after 5am by which time Abdeslam was nowhere to be seen.

The revelation came amid reports that two terror suspects of French nationality were arrested in a refugee shelter in Saltburg, Austria. According to AFP, the pair are thought to have posed as migrants along with two of the Paris killers who were travelling with fake Syrian passports.

According to the German domestic intelligence service chief, the killers' actions were a deliberate ploy to discredit refugees in a “show of force” to “prove what it can do".

Hans-Georg Maassen, director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), told Germany’s Phoenix television the BfV believes they deliberately allowed themselves to be registered so that their route would be uncovered.

“Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) staged a show of force,” the intelligence chief said. “It wanted to show what it can do. It wanted to impress us. It also wanted to discredit the flow of refugees.”

Mr Maassen said it was time to stop treating Isil as terrorists, saying the jihadists have nothing in common with traditional terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction, which was active in Germany in the seventies and eighties.

“To call Isil a terrorist organisation trivialises the problem,” Mr Maassen said. “Isil is a state-like entity that wants to wage war against us.”

• Belgian police hunt two 'armed and dangerous' new terror suspects over Paris attacks

As controversy over Abdeslam’s escape escalated, the federal prosecutor’s office sought to defuse the allegations on Wednesday. While it confirmed to La Libre Belgique that police did have to wait several hours before conducting the raid, it said that the tip-off proved incorrect and that Abdeslam had not been at that address.

The reports follow recent revelations that Salah Abdeslam, his brother Brahim and Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged chief organiser of the Paris attacks, were all on a terror suspect watch list handed by Belgian intelligence to the mayor of Molenbeek a month previously.

Françoise Schepmans, mayor of Molenbeek, a Brussels district dubbed a “terrorists’ den” due its links with jihadists, has admitted receiving a list with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as islamic militants living in her area.

She said: “What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists. That’s the responsibility of the federal police”.

Belgium has come under criticism in France over its perceived intelligence failings before and after the attacks, with Le Monde newspaper calling it a "clearing house for jihadism" that risks becoming a fractious "nation without a state".

