The Tunisian terrorist who shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels on Monday night was an illegal migrant flagged as a radical Islamist seven years ago, authorities have confirmed. He gunned down the Swedes, reportedly while shouting “Allahu akbar,” just hours before he was finally due to be vetted by Belgian Federal Police.
Belgian police shot and arrested the gunman Abdesalem Lassoued (45) on Tuesday, October 17th, after a citywide manhunt. The man died in hospital later that morning, RTBF reports.
In a video posted in Arabic on social media, Lassoued claimed responsibility for the murders and said “he was inspired by the Islamic State” (IS) extremist group, prosecutors said.
The Swedish nationality of his victims was a motivation, prosecutors continued, adding that there appeared to be no links with the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East.
Sweden has drawn the ire of Muslim countries and Islamists after multiple burnings of the Koran, Islam’s holy book.
Following last night’s shooting, Brussels’ threat level was raised to level 4, the highest. For now, it remains in force, as police presence is increased and extra security for vulnerable locations is provided.
Earlier, Prime Minister Alexander de Croo told a news conference “The terrorist attack that happened yesterday was committed with total cowardice, the attacker chose as a target two Swedish football fans,” adding that a third person was seriously wounded.
He also said the suspect was a man of Tunisian origin who had been living in the country illegally, as his claim for asylum had been rejected.
State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor (CD&V) confirmed the PM’s earlier statement, HLN reports.
Since 2020, Lassoued has resided in Schaarbeek, a Brussels neighborhood known to be a breeding ground for Islamist radicalisation. While he was not on Belgium’s OCAD list, which identifies persons who might pose a terrorist or extremist threat, in his home country he had been flagged as a possible Muslim extremist.
Indeed Belgian Federal Police had been made aware of the Tunisian man’s designation as a Muslim extremist in his native country back in 2016 – and were supposed to do an appraisal of his status today.
According to Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld), the Tunisian was already known to police for “suspicious acts, human trafficking, illegal residence and state security” in his native country.
Already in July 2016, “unconfirmed information was transmitted to us through a foreign police agency that the man had a radicalized profile and that he wanted to leave for a jihad conflict zone,” the minister continued. He added that “those kinds of reports were legion at the time—especially when the terror crisis was in full swing. Dozens of reports of that nature came in in a single day.”
Police did investigate, but nothing more was done. “As far as our [security] services knew,” the justice minister said, “there were no concrete indications of radicalization, which is why the person was not on the OCAD list.”
The shooting of two Swedish nationals, just before a Belgium-Sweden football match, had left Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström “devastated.”
Following the news, the European qualifier match was abandoned at half-time.
Chairman of the Swedish Football Association and former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was present in the stadium at the time of the attack. In a brief interview following the announcement the match would not proceed, Reinfeldt said it had “long been taken for granted that as a Swede you can travel to different places in the world,” and that that night’s attack was “not what we want to associate with football, but it is very serious that it happened.”
In an August 16th, 2014 speech, Reinfeldt urged Swedish citizens to welcome the influx of refugees:
I want to remind you that we are a nation that has stood up and been open in the past in times when people have endured severe hardship. We now have people fleeing in numbers similar to what we had during the Balkan crisis in the early 1990s. Now I appeal to the Swedish people to be patient, to open your hearts to see people under great stress and with threats to their own lives, fleeing, fleeing to Europe, fleeing to freedom, fleeing to better conditions.
Conservative Swedish politicians were in no doubt that the Brussels shooting was a result of the mass migration that has changed Sweden and Europe. Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, posted on Facebook that,
We must stand together against the blind hatred that Islamists have brought to our part of the world. The fact that innocent people repeatedly fall victim to the senseless violence of Islamist terror is one of the greatest tragedies of our time.
Charlie Weimers, MEP for the Sweden Democrats, posted that
Two Swedes in national team shirts executed by an Islamist on the street in Brussels. I would have been at the game myself with my daughters if it wasn’t a plenary session in Strasbourg. Media reports that Slayem Slouma [the name the shooter gave in the video he broadcast before the shooting] shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ before shooting and was a self-declared member of ISIS. Boasted that he would kill infidels. My thoughts are with the victims’ families. My determination to fight Islamism has never been greater
Belgium has long been a favored target for Islamist attacks, the most notorious being the March 2016 attacks in Brussels’ main airport and on the metro system by IS terrorists, which killed 32.
