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Italy Arrests Algerian Tied to Forgery in Paris and Brussels Attacks Tensions Erupt in Brussels, and Police in 4 Countries Make Arrests
(about 4 hours later)
BRUSSELS — An Algerian man who was part of a counterfeiting ring that provided forged documents to people involved in the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks has been arrested in Italy, the Italian authorities announced Sunday. BRUSSELS — The police in at least four countries arrested new suspects during the weekend in the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks, as memorials in central Brussels to the victims of Tuesday’s bombings were briefly overrun by hooligans.
The Belgian government issued a European arrest warrant for the man — whom the ANSA news agency identified as Djamal Eddine Ouali, 40 — on Jan. 6, the Italian State Police said. Mr. Ouali’s name emerged during searches carried out in October in the Saint-Gilles borough of Brussels, where the police found around 1,000 digital images used to make false identity documents. Angry protesters gathered near the Brussels stock exchange on Sunday. Chanting “Belgie barst” — or “Break up Belgium,” a Flemish slogan used by one of Belgium’s nationalist far-right parties — they brandished flares and threw water bottles at peaceful demonstrators who were holding banners proclaiming unity.
ANSA reported that the forgery ring produced false documents used by three men: Mohamed Belkaid, who was killed in a police raid on March 15 in Brussels; Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks, who was captured in Brussels on March 18; and Najim Laachraoui, one of two suicide attackers who struck Brussels Airport on Tuesday. “This is very dangerous,” said Anne Kluyskens, 61, who lives on the outskirts of Brussels and had come to the center of the Belgian capital to show solidarity with the attack victims and other Belgian citizens. “The extreme right are as dangerous as the jihadists. They have a message of hate.”
The Algerian man recently applied at an immigration office in Italy for a residency permit, and a police check determined that he was wanted by the Belgian authorities. He was arrested while walking on Saturday afternoon in Bellizzi, a town in southwestern Salerno Province. “Perhaps their actions are not yet as violent, but it is the same message,” she added.
The Belgian prosecutor’s office issued a news release on Sunday saying that 13 searches had been carried out that morning in French- and Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium. They were related to a terrorism case, according to the release, which did not say whether they were directly tied to the attacks in Brussels. Nine people were brought in for questioning, and five of them were released. The prosecutor’s office said no further details were available, pending the outcome of the searches. The police used water cannons to drive back the far-right protesters, and the square was reopened after the brief clash. The episode, however, was a reminder of the tension in the city after the terrorist attacks that killed 28, plus the three bombers, and of the anger fueling far-right parties here and around Europe who want to sharply limit immigration.
As investigators in several countries pursued leads in an intensifying effort to prevent Islamic State militants from carrying out additional attacks, Belgians observed the Easter holiday. According to a Brussels police spokesman, Christian de Coninck, quoted by the Belga news agency, about 340 hooligans supporting various Belgian soccer clubs had come to Brussels from Vilvoorde, a Flemish town a 20-minute drive from the capital. Mr. Connick told the news agency that the men had made “fascist salutes.”
The streets in central Brussels were quiet, nearly empty, on Sunday morning. At a makeshift memorial on the Place de la Bourse, named for the city’s stock exchange, television crews were gone, but people continued to leave candles, flowers and tokens of sympathy for the victims of the attacks and their families. Others wrote messages like “We pray” in colored chalk on the sidewalk. The diverse, peaceful crowd attending the informal gathering for the victims on Easter, in the square in front of the historic Brussels stock exchange, was far larger than those that had gathered earlier in the week, because many people had come to the capital for a planned March Against Fear, which was canceled a day before. Among those lighting candles and taking photos were blond, blue-eyed Belgians; Muslim women, their heads covered with the hijab; and dark-haired men from Belgium’s large Moroccan community.
A “March Against Fear,” planned for Sunday, was called off on Saturday at the urging of the authorities, who worried that the police would be stretched too thin if they had to protect marchers while trying to guard the city. Some held up flags of various countries, and one group had a banner that said, “Pas au Nom d’Islam,” meaning that the terrorist attacks had not been done in the name of Islam. Many lit candles in memory of those who had died, and some in attendance said they had friends who had been injured at the Maelbeek station, where a suicide bomber killed 13 people on Tuesday.
However, later in the day, angry right-wing demonstrators gathered at the makeshift memorial in the square near the stock exchange. They picked fights with mourners who had turned out and confronted riot police officers who moved in to clear the square. Yousra Ziani, 16, a Belgian high school student whose parents emigrated from Morocco, said her parents had advised her against going out because they worried about her safety. She felt she had to come, saying, “It is important to show our unity and solidarity as Belgians.”
In his Easter homily, Jozef De Kesel, the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and the top Roman Catholic prelate in Belgium, said the attacks last week were “beyond comprehension.” Ms. Ziani said she lived on the street in the Forest neighborhood where a shootout on March 15 injured four police officers and killed Mohamed Belkaid, one of the men suspected of being involved in planning the attacks in Paris and Brussels.
“Easter is a celebration of hope — Christ is reborn, he vanquished evil and death,” Archbishop De Kesel said in his homily, which was delivered at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula and released to the Belgian news media the night before. “But what does this mean? More than ever, we realize that hope is always contested.” He urged Belgians to “resist evil and despair,” adding: “This is the power of faith that does not yield to anxiety.” “The raid in Forest happened just in front of my eyes,” she said.
On Saturday evening, the Belgian federal crisis center announced that the attack had killed 28 victims. The death toll was originally 31, but that figure included the bodies of three suicide attackers — two who struck the airport, and one who bombed a subway train as it left the Maelbeek station, near the headquarters of the European Union. The arrests announced over the weekend in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands underscored that the European authorities have yet to get a handle on the extent of terrorist networks on the Continent.
The process of identifying the dead has been agonizingly slow in some cases, causing anguish for families whose loved ones have been reported missing. The identification process has taken time because investigators “want to be 100 percent certain and not make mistakes,” the crisis center said in a statement. An Algerian man suspected of being part of a counterfeiting ring that provided forged documents to people involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks was arrested in Italy, the Italian authorities announced on Sunday.
Of the 28 dead, 24 have been positively identified, 14 from the airport and 10 from the subway station. Of those 24, 13 were Belgian and 11 were foreigners. The Belgian government had issued a European arrest warrant for the man — whom the ANSA news agency identified as Djamal Eddine Ouali, 40 — on Jan. 6, the Italian State Police said. Mr. Ouali’s name emerged during searches in October in the Saint-Gilles borough of Brussels, where police found around 1,000 digital images used to make false identity documents.
The number of people injured stood at 340, of whom 101 were still hospitalized at 33 locations, 62 of them in intensive care units and 32 at a burn center. ANSA reported that the forgery ring had produced false documents used by three men: Mr. Belkaid; Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks, who was captured in Brussels on March 18; and Najim Laachraoui, one of two suicide attackers who struck Brussels Airport on Tuesday, killing 15 people.
The dead included people from eight nations; the injured, 19. The Algerian man had recently applied at an immigration office in Italy for a residency permit, and a police check found that he was wanted by the Belgians. He was arrested while walking on Saturday afternoon in Bellizzi, a town in the southwestern Salerno Province.
On Friday in Germany, the police detained two people also suspected of links to the attacks: One was picked up during a routine identity check in a town north of Frankfurt. Text messages on his cellphone appeared to be from one of the men who carried out Tuesday’s suicide attacks, according to German news reports.
The Belgian prosecutor’s office issued a news release on Sunday saying 13 searches had been carried out that morning in French- and Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium. The release said the arrests were related to a terrorism case but did not say whether they were directly tied to the attacks in Brussels.
Nine people were taken in for questioning, with five of them later released. The prosecutor’s office said no further details were available, pending the outcome of the searches.
And late Sunday, a spokesman for the Dutch prosecutors’ office confirmed that the police in the Netherlands had arrested a 32-year-old man in Rotterdam at the request of the French police on the suspicion that he had been involved in planning attacks in France.