2023-10-18 09:14:00
The street where Abdessalem Lassoued spent his last half hour is closed. The scientific police are at work, a few hours after the Tunisian jihadist was shot dead by the police. Schaerbeek, one of the nineteen municipalities that make up Brussels, is experiencing a life-size “celebrity” that it could have done without. Like a new Molenbeek. It becomes the city where a man claiming to be part of the Islamic State decided to die after killing two Swedes, a sixty-year-old and a seventy-year-old, whom he shot without blinking with a weapon of war, an AR 15 assault rifle. .
In the meantime, the journalists go to an unnamed café with unbeatable prices, one euro for a latte. It’s a café like you find in the towns of the Maghreb, a counter, a thick coffee machine (“elegance”, in embossed letters), milk, lots of sugar in the cups. The place only has men as customers, mainly Moroccans.
READ ALSO After Arras, Brussels bereaved by jihadist violenceA pensioner (a retiree) explains to his wife on the phone that “it is impossible to go home, the police are blocking the street”. In a perched corner, a television broadcasts Al-Jazeera live from Gaza. Nobody is looking. Everyone is on their phone, playing their index finger like a guitar string to scroll through the “news” on social networks. “We are the center of the world,” boasts a teenager.
Abdessalem Lassoued, an “old” jihadist
Finally, the police break camp, letting a plethora of journalists walk to number 13 street. Under the Al Khaima brand, we promise in capital letters “tea room, breakfast, wood-fired grills”. It is here that Abdessalem Lassoued ended his days. The police, informed by a person who recognized him (his photo was leaked from his murders the previous evening), intervened shortly before 8 a.m. The hunt lasted all night. It ends suddenly. The terrorist is seated, facing the entrance. Neighbors speak of one gunshot, others speak of two. He was fatally injured and was pronounced dead a little later in hospital.
Abdessalem Lassoued is an “old” jihadist. There are not many of them who, at the age of 45, take up Allah’s career as a suicide bomber. Especially since the man is married – his wife is a hairdresser – and the father of a child in public school until the start of the 2022 school year, when she is placed in a Koranic confessional establishment.
READ ALSO Attack in Arras: why so many terrorist siblings? During the Arab Spring of 2011, this Tunisian, known to the police for assault and battery, took advantage of the police vacuum linked to the revolution to flee by sea, towards the small Italian island of Lampedusa. Once in the European Union, he went to Sweden where he was refused the right of residence and where he served two years in prison, from 2012 to 2014.
After serving his sentence, he returned to Italy until 2016 when the ad hoc services detected his desire to go and wage jihad in Syria. It rebounds in Belgium, a country considered more fluid on the subject of Islamism. He filed an asylum request, which was refused due to his past criminal offenses – he had never been convicted in Belgium but was suspected of “trafficking in human beings”, “endangering the security of the State” – and its radical Islamism. The expulsion decision will never be enforced.
Lassoued seemed to be waiting for the police
Louassed therefore took action on October 16, shortly after 7 p.m., claiming to be a “member of the Islamic State” in a video, pledging allegiance to his caliph. He says he is acting to “avenge the Muslims” of the Swedes in the name of the copies of the Koran burned in Stockholm by a customary Iraqi Christian.
Equipped with a weapon of war, he chases down and kills two Swedish nationals in the lobby of a building in the heart of the Belgian capital. At the same time, the Roi-Baudoin stadium hosts the football match between the Red Devils and Sweden, a match which has not been classified as risky. Is this personal resentment justified by a radical Islamist motive?
READ ALSO Korans burned: “Russian media denigrate Sweden in the Arabic-speaking world” Abdoulaye has lived in this part of Schaerbeek with his wife and children for two years and he wants to leave. “I have a 16-year-old teenager, I don’t want him to live in daily contact with drugs, I don’t want someone to give him his first dose to earn easy money and become addicted to money” , said this African with tired eyes. Her daughter walked past the Al Khaima teahouse just before the gunshots and the police arrived. She was going to school.
Abdessalem Lassoued, according to witnesses, seemed to be waiting for the police. In the claim video, he explained that he was preparing to “join his creator”. The man allegedly performed the Fajr prayer (dawn prayer) in a nearby mosque, “a small mosque,” according to Khalil, a former religion professor. The offender will have wanted to clear his criminal record by committing crimes in the name of Islam. Like a Tony Montana who only read, and poorly, two suras.
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