Paris attacks: Belgian 'delay' let Abdeslam go

Salah Abdeslam was eventually arrested in a dramatic raid in Brussels in March

Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam was allowed to leave France because Belgium did not tell police in time that he was involved in jihadist circles, a senior French MP has said.

The suspect was stopped on the border after the November attacks but let go. Sebastien Pietrasanta, who is leading a French parliamentary inquiry into the attack, said Belgium had provided limited details on an EU crime file.

Salah Abdeslam is now being held in a four-cell complex at Fleury-Merogis jail south of Paris

It was not until 18 March that Salah Abdeslam was caught. He was originally stopped on the French border with Belgium on 14 November, a day after the attacks.

He was in a car with two other men and held for 30 minutes, because his name was on a Schengen Information System (SIS II) file, which allows countries in the passport-free area to issue alerts on criminal suspects.


However, the file only held information about Salah Abdeslam's criminal past and not his links to militant Islam. "While Salah Abdeslam was known by Belgian authorities to belong to the jihad movement, for what reason did this information not appear in the file?" Mr Pietrasanta told AFP news agency ahead of his full report on the case on Tuesday.

That information was eventually passed on, more than an hour after he was allowed to cross the border.

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Last week, Hamza Attouh, one of two men accused of helping Salah Abdeslam escape to Belgium, was extradited to France to face preliminary charges of helping a criminal linked to an act of terrorism. A second man, Mohammed Amri, faces similar charges in Belgium.

Belgian officials have already indicated that they were close to arresting Salah Abdeslam at a house in the Brussels area of Molenbeek in the early hours of 16 November, but had to wait until after 05:00 to comply with law banning overnight police searches.

It was not for another four months that he was caught, four days before bomb attacks on Brussels airport and the Brussels metro in which 32 people died.