No, this isn’t the ugly face of an awful Jamiroquai impersonator; it’s the ugly face of terror, and according to French officials, the face of the Belgian man they believe and planned and orchestrated the horrific attacks on Paris this past Friday night.
Monday morning, the Associated Press revealed another hideous thing about this extremely hideous guy: he was captured in manhunt earlier this year, but was ultimately let free.
His name? Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Intelligence officials and news sources are now saying that he attended one of Brussels’ most “prestigious high schools” as an adolescent, and sometime after “adopted the radical view of Islam” that mapped his fate: becoming a piece of trash and designing an attack that killed innocent lives on a fall night in one of the world’s most beloved cities.
But if you thought this was this animal’s first go-round with attempting to murder civilian lives, well, you’re wrong. He’s been tied to several attacks that were kiboshed by European authorities — the high-speed train attack that was in part thwarted by United States military tourists, one on a French church as well as a masterplan to go after French police.
And that’s what’s especially stinging in all of this — many of these terrorists involved in Friday night’s massacre/bombing were known to officials in Europe, many of them apprehended and even taken in custody in the past few years.
One bomber who blew himself up in the Bataclan music hall was a 28-year-old French citizen charged with terrorist in 2012. Rather than being imprisoned, he was “placed under judicial supervision”. The only problem with that? He escaped, and since has been the “subject of an international arrest warrant”.
His fellow bomber, Omar Ismail Mostefai, was ID’ed as a terrorist in 2014 and 2015 and was “flagged as having ties to Islamic extremism five years ago”.
The most damning and stinging evidence regarding missed opportunities to thwart the recent attack that killed more than 120 people and injured hundreds more comes via the repulsive man in the photograph above (Abaaoud), and the AP (and Gawker, as well):
Belgian authorities suspect him of also helping organize and finance a terror cell in the eastern city of Verviers that was broken up in an armed police raid on Jan. 15, in which two of his presumed accomplices were killed.
The following month, Abaaoud was quoted by the Islamic State group’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, as saying that he had secretly returned to Belgium to lead the terror cell and then escaped to Syria in the aftermath of the raid despite having his picture broadcast across the news.
“I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!” Abaaoud boasted.
French authorities are not looking to make the same aforementioned mistakes again. More than 100 people are under house arrest across the country after early morning raids were carried out to capture potential conspirators and links to the terrorists themselves. Also, three people (and maybe more) have been taken into custody in a small neighborhood in Brussels called Molenbeek, the location where many believe the eighth Paris terrorist/attacker — Salah Abdeslam — is hiding (there have already been two explosions in the area of the search).