ANT KATZ

An official with the prosecutor’s office says the
suspect has been handed to anti-terrorist investigators. She says the man was
arrested on Friday during a customs inspection at a train and bus station in
Marseille.

The man was found to have an automatic weapon of the
same type used in the Brussels shootings of May 24. The official said ballistics
analyses were under way to determine if it was the same weapon.

Reuters and the Associated Press have reported that Paris
Prosecutor Francois Molins says police arrested the suspect, Mehdi Nemmouche,
on Friday in Marseille after he arrived on a bus from Amsterdam.

He says the suspect had an automatic weapon like
that used in the Brussels attack, and a white sheet scrawled with the name of
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an extremist group fighting in Syria.

Radicalised behind bars

Molins said that Nemmouche had been behind bars at
least five previous times in France, and became radicalised there.

“During his last stay in jail he was noticed
for extremist (Islamic) proselytism,” Molins said. “On December 31  2012,
three weeks after he was freed, he travelled to Syria.”

He added: “He spent over a year in Syria, where
he seems to have joined the ranks of combatant groups, jihadist terrorist
groups.”

Nemmouche was being held on charges of murder,
attempted murder and possession of weapons, all of which in the framework of a
terrorist activity, Molins said. Nemmouche had said nothing so far, he added.

Experts have for years been worried about the
radicalisation of foreign nationals who travel to Syria to fight for one side or
another in the three-year-old civil war. Now the Brussels shootings raises fears
that the hundreds of Europeans who have gone to join Islamic extremists in
Syria could stage attacks back home.

“The new elements in this investigation draw
attention once more to the problem of the ‘returnees’ – in other words the
people going to Syria to participate in combat and return afterward to our
country,” said Van Leeuw. “All European countries are confronted at
this moment with this problem.”