Sunday, June 1, 2014

Islamist Arrested In Brussels Jewish Museum Murders


French police have arrested a man suspected of being involved in the shooting deaths last weekend of four people at Brussels' Jewish Museum, official sources in Belgium and France said on Sunday.

The 29-year-old Frenchman was arrested in the southern French city of Marseilles on Friday and had a Kalashnikov and another gun with him, a French police source said. The man, from the northern city of Roubaix, had been in jail in 2012. AFP quoted sources close to the investigation as naming the suspect as Mehdi Nemmouche.


French media reported that the man was suspected of having stayed in Syria with jihadist groups in 2013.

French President Francois Hollande confirmed a suspect had been arrested and said France was determined to do all it could to stop radicalized youths from carrying out attacks.

"We will monitor those jihadists and make sure that when they come back from a fight that is not theirs, and that is definitely not ours ... to make sure that when they come back they cannot do any harm," Hollande told reporters.

The message "to these jihadists is that we will fight them, we will fight them and we will fight them", he said.

Hollande has said previously the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism.

"This is a relief," Joel Rubinfeld, head of the Belgian League against Antisemitism told BFM TV, saying he had received confirmation of the news.

"But this is also worrying us ... it is crucial that countries who have citizens who have gone to Syria take all necessary measures to make sure this does not happen again."

Police released a 30-second video clip from the museum's security cameras showing a man wearing a dark cap, sunglasses and a blue jacket enter the building, take a Kalashnikov rifle out of a bag, and shoot into a room, before calmly walking out.

Two of the four people killed in the attack, which authorities have surmised may have been motivated by anti-Semitism, were an Israeli couple from Tel Aviv who were vacationing in Belgium.

The bodies of Emanuel and Mira Riva of Tel Aviv, aged 54 and 53, were flown back to Israel last week and they were laid to rest on Tuesday.

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