A suspect in the killing of two Swedish football fans in Brussels last night was shot dead by police today.
The suspect, reported to be Abdesalem Lassoued, a 45 year-old Tunisian was shot and killed by armed police at 8am this morning after an overnight manhunt.
Brussels has been put on high terror alert following the attack last night, which left two dead and a third injured outside King Baudouin Stadium in the city centre.
According to Italian news agency ANSA, Lassoued arrived in Lampedusa, Sicily, on a dinghy in 2011, one of his many attempts to seek asylum in Europe. After arriving in Italy, Lassoued went to Sweden. He was deported from Sweden in 2016 and returned to Italy.
It is claimed Italian intelligence later classed Lassoued as “radicalised” and having expressed interest in jihadism, but no action was taken.
According to reports the attacker later moved to Belgium, where his asylum claim was rejected. A deportation order was issued in 2021, but the Belgian minister in charge of asylum, Nicole de Moor, said today he “disappeared from the radar” after his asylum claim was refused. He had been living in Schaerbeek, in central Brussels, illegally since then.
Belgium’s Justice Minister, Vincent Van Quickenborn, said Lassoued had been previously convicted of “common law offences” in Tunisia but had not been reported as a terror threat until 2016. At the time, he said, “no imminent terrorist threat” was detected despite reports of his Jihadist sympathies.
The Sun reports that Lassoued was “well known” in Tunisia for his role in human trafficking.
After the shooting, Lassoued posted a Facebook video claiming in Arabic that he was a member of Islamic State and that the attack was “revenge in the name of Muslims”, though Belgian prosecutors say there is no evidence the attacker was directly linked to the renewed conflict in the Middle East. That final claim – given the context of the Hamas terror attack on Israel – is likely to be greeted with scepticism.
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