French court charges Abdeslam

PARIS: Top Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam was charged with murder, association with a terrorist group and possession of weapons and explosives, his lawyer said.
Abdeslam, believed to be the sole survivor among a group of militants who killed 130 people in Paris in November, was extradited to France from Belgium on Wednesday.
Abdeslam, 26, was Europe’s most wanted fugitive until his capture in Brussels on March 18 after a four-month manhunt.
He was taken by helicopter to Paris under armed guard and then driven to the capital’s main law courts.
French Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said Abdeslam would be held in a high-security prison in the Paris region.
Frank Berton, a high-profile French criminal lawyer, said he would lead Abdeslam’s defense and had visited his client for more than two hours last week in his prison cell in Belgium along with Abdeslam’s Belgian lawyer, Sven Mary.
Investigators say Abdeslam told them he arranged logistics for the multiple suicide bombings and shooting attacks in Paris and had planned to blow himself up at the Stade de France sports stadium before backing out at the last minute.
He is suspected of having rented two cars used to transport the attackers to, and around, the French capital.
“He told me naturally that he has things to say and he will say them. He wants to talk,” Berton told BFM TV. “What counts and what matters for us as his lawyers is simply that he gets a fair trial, that he is sentenced for things he did and not things that he didn’t do. That’s vital because he is the sole survivor.”
Abdeslam’s elder brother Brahim, with whom he used to run a bar in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, blew himself up in a suicide bomb attack on one of several Paris cafes targeted by a group of assailants armed with AK-47 rifles and suicide vests.
Salah Abdeslam’s confession to investigators suggested he may have been the 10th man referred to in a Daesh claim of responsibility for the multi-pronged attack on the stadium, bars and the Bataclan concert hall.