Paris: Investigators on Sunday extended into a fifth day the detention of a man arrested on Wednesday outside the building where the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks died, the prosecutor’s office said Jawad Bendaoud told a French television station he had been asked to put two people up in his apartment for three days, but had no idea they had anything to do with terrorism. He was then taken away by police.
Under an anti-terrorism law introduced in 2006, suspects can be held for up to six days if there is a serious risk of an imminent act of terrorism, or for international cooperation. Then they must be charged or released.
Police have already released the seven other people detained during the assault on the flat last Wednesday in which presumed mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud and two other people died.
France has launched a massive investigation to get to the bottom of exactly who was behind the shootings and bombings in Paris last Friday at the national soccer stadium, a famous concert venue and several bars and restaurants.
Investigators believe Abaaoud, a Moroccan-born Belgian who had fought for Daesh in Syria and was one the group’s most high-profile European recruits, was the mastermind behind the attacks.
One of the suspected assailants, Salah Abdeslam, fled to Belgium the day after and fears of more deadly attacks prompted the authorities there to put Brussels on maximum alert on Saturday, November 21.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel advised the public to be alert rather than panic-stricken, but said the raised security level was due to the “serious and imminent” threat of Paris-style coordinated attacks.
Belgium has been at the heart of investigations into the Paris attacks after links emerged to Brussels, and the poor district of Molenbeek in particular. Two of the Paris bombers, Brahim Abdeslam and Bilal Hadfi, had been living in Belgium.
A poll conducted by IFOP for the Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper showed 27 per cent of respondents were satisfied with French President Francois Hollande following the Paris attacks, up from a 2015 low of 20 last month.
Switzerland probing 33 people over possible militant links
Meanwhile, Switzerland has active criminal proceedings against 33 individuals over suspected ties to extremist groups, but only three people are currently in custody, the attorney general’s office said Sunday.
Some of those cases have been opened in the last two to three months, but the most serious involves a cell of possible Islamist radicals uncovered in the Canton of Schaffhausen last year, said Andry Marty, a spokesman for Swiss Attorney General Michael Lauber.
“In total there are currently 33 ongoing criminal proceedings against suspected supporters and/or members of extremist Islamist organisations,” Marty told AFP in an email, confirming details given by Lauber in an interview with the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.
Local media have previously reported that the case in Schaffhausen, in Switzerland’s far north on the German border, involved Iraqi nationals who may have been in Switzerland illegally and could have been preparing an attack.
Marty provided no details of the allegations, but confirmed that three people involved in the Schaffhausen case remained incarcerated.
Switzerland’s Sunday papers were dominated by the rising anxiety that has spread across Europe in the wake of the Paris attacks last week that killed 130 people, and an ongoing anti-terror lockdown in Brussels.
Local Geneva lawmaker Vincent Maitre called for police to receive special terrorism response training.
He lamented that police in Geneva carry 9mm weapons, which he described as “water guns” compared to the “weapons of war used by terrorists”, according to newspaper Le Matin Dimanche.
