The man suspected of shooting dead two Swedish football fans was a 45-year-old Tunisian. (File)
Cairo:
A man suspected of shooting dead two Swedish football fans and wounding another in Brussels was a 45-year-old Tunisian whose asylum application was rejected in 2020 but continued to live illegally in Belgium, according to Belgian officials.
After an overnight manhunt, police shot dead the suspect at a cafe in the Schaerbeek district of northern Brussels on Tuesday morning, a day after his deadly attack, which prosecutors are treating as an act of terrorism.
Authorities said initial indications were that the suspect, whom they have not named, was working as a lone wolf and not as part of a broad network.
In a video claiming responsibility for the attack, he said he was a member of the Islamic State group and gave his name as Abdesalem Al Guilani. The Belgian state broadcaster RTBF called him Abdesalem Lassoued.
At the yellow-brick apartment building in Schaerbeek overlooking a small park where the suspect lived, uniformed police stood guard Tuesday morning as investigators searched for evidence inside.
The suspect lived with a partner and their daughter in an apartment one floor above the ground floor, neighbors said. The partner worked in a women’s hair salon, according to a neighbor, who did not want to be named.
“He was the kind of person you would say hello to, but not much more. He kept to himself,” said a woman, standing opposite a door smashed by police in the apartment above the suspect’s.
“He was polite, there was no indication that something like this could happen,” said a male neighbor.
During a news briefing earlier on Tuesday, as police searched for the suspect, Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne said the man was known to police and suspected of crimes such as human trafficking and illegal residence.
In 2016, a foreign police service passed on an unconfirmed report that the man had a “radicalized profile” and wanted to go to a war zone to wage jihad, Van Quickenborne said.
It later emerged that his identification as a subject at risk of radicalization came from Italy, where he had arrived in 2011. He also moved to Sweden, from where he was later deported.
But the Belgian minister said there were “no concrete indications” that the man had been radicalized during the time he was known to Belgian security services, and that he was therefore not on any watchlist.
After his asylum application was rejected in October 2020, Belgian authorities said he “disappeared from the radar” before a deportation order was issued in March 2021 that was not enforced.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said he was not among the roughly 700 people on Belgium’s terror list and had not stayed in an asylum seeker center, making it harder to track him down and deport him.
“The illegal Tunisian lived here below the waterline and yesterday he cowardly struck our society from below the waterline,” said De Croo, adding that an deportation order must be carried out more urgently.
The shooting came at a time of heightened security concerns in much of Europe linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
This year, Belgian authorities received a tip that the man had been convicted of terrorism in Tunisia, but the information turned out to be false as the man had only been convicted of common law offences, Van Quickenborne said.
Nevertheless, apparently out of an abundance of caution, security authorities had convened a meeting to discuss his case, the minister said.
The meeting was supposed to take place on Tuesday, the day he was fatally shot by police.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
