Salah Abdeslam

Salah Abdeslam is the only surviving member of the cell that killed 130 people in Paris on 13 November 2015, and the four months he spent at large afterwards changed European policing. He was born in Brussels to Moroccan parents, grew up in Molenbeek, ran a bar with his brother, and had a record of petty crime rather than piety - he had been in a young offenders institution with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who organised the attacks. On the night he drove three suicide bombers to the Stade de France and was to detonate a vest in the eighteenth arrondissement; he did not, and the vest was later found discarded and reportedly faulty, so whether he decided or the device failed is unresolved and he has given both accounts. He was driven back to Belgium by friends and hidden in Molenbeek for 126 days, a few streets from his family home, until a police raid in March 2016. Four days after his arrest the same network bombed Brussels airport and metro, killing thirty-two. He refused to speak for years, then testified at the Paris trial in 2021 and 2022 - the largest in modern French history, with some 1,800 civil parties - and was given a whole-life sentence, which France has imposed four times. The trial ran for ten months in a purpose-built courtroom and was filmed for the national archives, which French law permits only for proceedings of historical importance. Molenbeek's reputation as a jihadist district was made by the four months he spent hidden there, and Belgian policing was reorganised afterwards around the fact that six separate forces covered Brussels and shared little. He was convicted separately in Belgium of attempted murder over a shootout during his arrest. His brother Brahim died detonating a vest on the Boulevard Voltaire the same night. The families of the victims formed an association that has kept the case in public view.

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