Yahoo News is reporting today that Salah Abdeslam, the last surviving member of the team that carried out the terrorist attack on Paris, has been captured.
The article includes a timeline of Salah Abdeslam’s life:
This man was born in Brussels. He was considered a French national. The article reports that he had evidently planned to blow himself up with a suicide vest, but changed his mind at the last moment. A suicide vest was found in Paris after the attack in an area Abdeslam’s cell phone indicated that he had been in.
The article reports:
The ringleader of the attacks, IS member Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was also from Brussels. He was killed in a raid in Paris in November.
Another of the Paris attackers, Bilal Hadfi, was last week buried quietly in the same cemetery as Abdeslam’s brother.
Both had links to Molenbeek, a largely immigrant district which has been a hotbed of Islamist violence for decades.
Abdeslam and his brother had run a bar in the area until it was shut down by the authorities a few weeks before the Paris attacks.
It is frightening to think that ISIS is successfully recruiting western-born terrorists for suicide attacks in Western countries. This man would have easily been able to come to America on a French visa. That thought is troubling.