Brussels – “You live for religion and you die for religion. I am ready to meet God happy and serene.” Abdesalem Lassoued, the Brussels attacker, could fit into the most classic profile of a radicalized member of ISIS. Videos on social media in which he claims his crazy crusade, a complaint for threats via the internet, the months spent living like a ghost in Schaerbeek, one of the neighborhoods most densely inhabited by Muslims in Brussels. Until the extreme gesture: the attack on the three Swedish citizens in the heart of the city, the long escape into the night, the arrest and death at the hands of the federal police.
Born on 1st September 1978, of Tunisian origin, Abdesalem Lassoued, still has a rather obscure biography. But from the first information it emerges first of all that it was a subject monitored by federal authorities and known to the services for high “Islamic radicalization”. In November 2019 he applied for asylum in Belgium. A request that was rejected in October of the following year. And it is at that point that Abdesalem, in the words of the Minister for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor, “disappears from the radar”. On 12 February 2021, his name was deleted from the municipality’s national register, as it makes him even less traceable. And, above all, it makes repatriation difficult. Also because Abdesalem is not reported to any federal reception center and is not even presented by the police to the immigration offices.
The order to leave Belgium, issued in 2021, never becomes operational. On the other hand, as emerged from the man’s Facebook profile (now blocked), Abdesalem in 2021 was photographed in Genoa, in Piazza della Vittoria. Presumably while he was heading to France. At the beginning of 2023, an occupant of a center for asylum seekers near Antwerp reported the alleged Brussels attacker for threats via social media and informed the local police that Abdesalem had already been convicted of terrorism in Tunisia. There Last Sunday, the Antwerp judicial police had called a meeting on the case for today. Initial investigations revealed that Abdesalem had been convicted in Tunisia but only for common crimes, given that he had excluded him from being “a concrete and imminent threat”.
Nevertheless, Abdesalem’s crusade gradually took shape. In recent months, the man appears to have continued to live in Schaerbeek, the same neighborhood where Najim Laachraoui, one of the Brussels international airport attackers in 2016, lived. And a handful of kilometers from Molenbeek, Salah Abdeslam’s refuge, among the murderers of the Bataclan massacre in November 2015. In the hours preceding the murder of the two Swedes, on his Facebook account – where the man’s profile bears the name of Slayem Slouma – the attacker first shot a video who, with his hooded face, declared that “the book of Allah is a red line to sacrifice oneself for”. Then, immediately after the attack, another video appeared on the same account. With his face uncovered, the man claimed membership in ISIS and the attack. “I am Abdeslam Jilani, I took revenge for Muslims. I have killed three Swedes now”, these are the words of the alleged attacker who, in the video, also referred to the Muslim child stabbed a few days ago in Illinois.
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