Abdeslam tight-lipped in first interrogation

Salah Abdeslam

PARIS: The last surviving member of the team that attacked Paris in November, Salah Abdeslam, refused to answer questions in his first interview with a French anti-terror judge on Friday, his lawyer said.
Authorities had hoped he would shed some light on the operational details of the Nov. 13 attacks that killed 130 people, as well as provide clues as to whether other members of the wider cell are still at large.
But his lawyer Frank Berton said: “He did not want to say anything today.” The 26-year-old was prepared to speak at “a later date,” the lawyer added. “We need to give him time.”
Abdeslam is the only surviving member of the group of Daesh gunmen and suicide bombers who attacked multiple night spots around the capital and tried to breach the Stade de France national stadium.
For months, he was the most-wanted fugitive in Europe until he was tracked down and arrested on March 18 in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek where he grew up. Transferred to France on April 27, he is being held at Fleury-Merogis prison, southeast of Paris.
Abdeslam was brought for questioning in central Paris in a large black 4x4 vehicle with tinted windows, escorted by heavily armed elite police and a helicopter flying overhead.
But although he had spoken to investigators while in custody in Belgium, he refused to cooperate on Friday. The Paris prosecutor’s office said: “From the start, he exercised his right to remain silent by refusing to reply to questions from an investigating magistrate.
“He also refused to give his reasons for using his right to silence.
“He declined to confirm the statements he made previously to the Belgian police and to a Belgian investigating magistrate,” the prosecutor’s office added.
Meanwhile, Foued Mohamed-Aggad, one of the men who attacked the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people died on November 13, was buried in eastern France early Friday, a source close to the investigation said.
Mohamed-Aggad was buried in Wissembourg in the Alsace region where he had lived with his mother before traveling to Syria in late 2013.
Abdeslam played more of a logistical role, renting cars and hideouts for the gang and transporting the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade de France, killing one person.
A childhood friend of suspected ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Abdeslam is thought to have backed out of blowing himself up. An abandoned explosives vest was found in a dustbin in southern Paris close to where mobile phone data placed him on the night of the attacks, although his DNA was not found on it.
CCTV pictures from petrol stations showed him fleeing back to Belgium in the hours after the attack.
In the months before the attack, he also transported other jihadists around Europe, including Najim Laachraoui, the suspected bombmaker who went on to kill himself as one of the suicide bombers who struck Brussels on March 22, killing 32.