Google News: Suspect Arrested in Jewish Museum Killings in Belgium

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Europe |Suspect Arrested in Jewish Museum Killings in Belgium

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Mehdi Nemmouche was arrested in connection with last week’s fatal shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. Agence France-Presse â€” Getty Images

PARIS â€” A man suspected of the fatal shootings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last week has been arrested in southern France, French and Belgian officials said Sunday.

The man, identified in media reports as Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, is believed to have traveled to Syria last year, perhaps to join with radical Islamist fighters there. Mr. Nemmouche, a former resident of Tourcoing, an impoverished industrial city in northeastern France along the Belgium border, was taken into custody Friday after he got off a bus in Marseille that had come from Amsterdam by way of Brussels, police officials said.

President François Hollande of France said Sunday that the suspect had been stopped â€œas soon as he set foot in France.â€ Referring several times to French â€œjihadistsâ€ who have left for Syria, Mr. Hollande praised the â€œeffectiveness of our police forcesâ€ in preventing violence when such people return to France.

Media reports, however, indicated that Mr. Nemmouche may have been stopped during a routine customs check, not as a result of intelligence information. According to those reports, he was carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a handgun, ammunition, a baseball cap and a small video recording device. Those items match descriptions of the shooter in Brussels, whose calm, deliberate attack at the Museum was partially captured by video monitors.

The motive for the shootings on May 24 remains unclear. Killed were an Israeli couple who were tourists and a French woman who worked at the museum. A Belgian man was also shot and remains hospitalized in critical condition.

Mr. Nemmouche, who reportedly spent at least two years in prison for his involvement in the armed robbery of a small supermarket in his home city in 2009, is believed to have left for Syria in 2013, shortly after his release from prison, and to have returned to France in March, the French newspaper Le Monde reported.

French officials say that more than 700 French citizens, most of them young Arab men from the drab housing projects that ring many major French cities, have left to fight in Syria. Several have been arrested when they returned and charged under French antiterror laws.

The attack was being compared to that of a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda member, Mohammed Merah, who held French and Algerian citizenship and was raised in a poor neighborhood outside Toulouse, spent time in prison and was thought to have then traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan for combat training with Islamist fighters. After his return, he killed a rabbi and three Jewish children outside a Jewish day school in southern France in March 2012.