In a triumphant coordinated effort by French and Belgian police, the last at-large terrorist who took part in the tragic Paris massacre has been captured alive.
Salah Abdeslam has been at-large since the attack on November 13, 2015 when he and nine others took to the streets of Paris and succeeded in murdering 130 people and injuring 368 others. Police suspected that Abdeslam was the one who drove the vehicle which dropped off the nine others. Police also suspected that Adbeslam was wearing a suicide vest which he did not detonate and instead discarded in the trash.
The other nine attackers have already been killed by police authorities, and Abdeslam had been evading police since the attack. Investigators disagreed about where Abdeslam was hiding, with some believing that he was in Paris, others in Brussels, and some believed that he had fled to Syria to join up with ISIS militants.
Officers discovered Abdeslam’s whereabouts almost by accident, spotting his fingerprints in a raid in Brussels intended to gather more information about the group.
The news broke on Friday afternoon that police had Abdeslam in custody and that he suffered a gunshot wound to the leg, though the full chain of events leading up to his capture has not yet been released. The news was then confirmed by a Belgian migration official’s Twitter account which declared, “we’ve got him.”
Deal is rond.
— Theo Francken (@FranckenTheo) March 18, 2016
