Belgium Police Capture Main Suspect In Paris Attacks

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Anti-terror Belgium police arrested 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam on Friday, their top suspect in the Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

He is the last of the suspected terrorists who carried out the atrocity last November, the other nine either got killed or committed suicide.

VIDEO: Footage shows the moment #ParisAttacks mastermind is arrested in #Brussels earlier – @onlinemagazin pic.twitter.com/r1oSYyzj9k

— Conflict News (@Conflicts) March 18, 2016

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A Belgian minister apparently tweeted “we got him” after the capture, but the tweet has since been deleted.

“We got him” said Belgian minister Theo Francken, after Brussels raid for Salah Abdeslam https://t.co/eTjLhrScHr pic.twitter.com/WByeS8kGy8

— BBC Newsbeat (@BBCNewsbeat) March 18, 2016

Abdeslam was injured and captured during a raid by police officials in Molenbeek in Brussels on Friday.

The capture of Abdeslam was somewhat unexpected. Officials were surprised to find his fingerprints in a raid on a Brussels home Tuesday, where two suspects reportedly escaped. The New York Times has more:

The raid on Tuesday was not an attempt to capture Mr. Abdeslam. The authorities had targeted the home, on the Rue du Dries in the Forest section of Brussels, as part of an effort to collect additional intelligence. Over the past four months, the French and Belgian police have raided dozens of buildings, scooped up troves of documents and questioned scores of suspects as part of their investigation.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday’s raid ended with one man killed and four police officers injured:

Belgian prosecutors identified the dead man, who was shot by a sniper, as Mohamed Belkaid, a 35-year-old Algerian. But on Friday the prosecutor said it now believed he was the same man who used a false identification card with the name Samir Bouzid, wanted since December for his alleged connection to Mr. Abdeslam. The two were stopped with Mr. Abdeslam in a car traveling between Hungary and Austria in September, prosecutors said.

Authorities believe Abdeslam drove terrorists to the Bataclan theater and may have abandoned a plan to kill himself with an explosive-laden vest. The Bataclan, where 89 people were killed, became the bloodiest site of the November attacks. Abdeslam had frustrated authorities for months, escaping capture in both France and Belgium.