US: ISIS man linked to Paris attacker dead

Islamic State leader with “direct” ties to the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks was among 10 senior figures in the group killed in Syria and Iraq this month, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

Baghdad-based US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told reporters that French national Charaffe al Mouadan was killed in a US-led coalition air strike on December 24.

Mouadan had been actively plotting further attacks against the West, Warren said, without giving additional details.

“He was a Syrian-based ISIL member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Paris attacks cell leader,” Col. Warren said in a video call, using an alternative acronym for the ISIS group.

Mouadan (26) was the son of Morocco-born parents and the last of eight children. He grew up in the suburbs of Paris, and was arrested in October 2012 while getting ready to leave with two neighborhood friends for either Yemen or Afghanistan, via Somalia, a source close to the investigation told AFP.

The US has since August 2014 led an international coalition attacking the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria. Col. Warren declined to say if France had been involved in the strike against Mouadan.

Among the other leaders killed in December was a Syria-based Bangladeshi man who was educated in Britain and was allegedly an ISIS hacker.

“Now that he’s dead, ISIL has lost a key link between their networks,” Col. Warren said. He described another man as a forgery specialist with “links to the Paris attack network,” but he declined to offer additional details.

Meanwhile in Belgium, two people have been arrested on suspicion of planning attacks in Brussels during the holidays, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday.

The investigation revealed “the threat of serious attacks that would target several emblematic places in Brussels and be committed during the end-of-year holidays,” the prosecutor’s office said.

A source said the Belgian capital’s main square, thronged this time of year with holiday shoppers and strollers, was one of the suspected targets. Six people were taken in for questioning, but four were released, the office said.