Belgian judge orders Abrini, 6 others held for another month

BRUSSELS – A Belgian judge on Thursday ordered Mohamed Abrini and six other suspects arrested in connection with the attacks in Paris and Brussels kept behind bars for another month, prosecutors said.

Abrini, 31, has acknowledged being the “man in the hat” seen leaving Brussels Airport the morning of March 22, when two suicide bombers detonated explosives-laden suitcases there, killing 16.

Sixteen other people died that same morning when another bomber blew himself up on a Brussels subway train.

Osama Krayem, 23, a Swedish national suspected of being the accomplice of the subway bomber, was also kept in custody for another month, Belgian prosecutors said.

Krayem’s defence attorney told reporters his client has been talking to Belgian investigators.

“He said he assumed responsibility,” Vincent Lurquin said. “We’ll see what responsibility he will assume, but he has assumed in any event some responsibility, and that’s why he’s talking and being questioned.”

Belgian investigators are especially eager to learn what happened to a backpack Krayem was wearing the morning of the Brussels attacks that resembled one carried by subway bomber Khalid El Bakraoui.

“There’s a bag, he has said what he knew about it,” Lurquin said of his client. “He didn’t avoid the problem. He answered.”

Lurquin said that he couldn’t make public any details about the investigation.

The others ordered held in custody by the judge included four more suspects charged in the Brussels attacks, and one man accused of helping key Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam escape from France to Belgium.

Abrini, who was arrested in Belgium last week, also had close ties to the attackers who killed 130 victims on Nov. 13 in Paris, and is believed to have travelled to Syria and to have met with suspected Muslim extremists in England.

France’s BFM television reported Abrini has claimed to investigators he “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Belgian and French authorities have detained dozens of suspects in their investigations of the attacks, which were claimed by Islamic State group extremists.

Separately Thursday, Belgian national media said an influential recruiter for armed Islamic groups in Syria was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Khalid Zerkani was handed the sentence by a Brussels appeals court. Among his recruits were two Brussels residents, Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Chakib Akrouh, who helped staged the Paris attacks. Abaaoud and Akrouh themselves died soon afterward in a police siege.