Paris gunman Salah Abdeslam arrested in Brussels

Turkey said it had identified him as a potential terrorism suspect and notified French authorities as early as 2014, a senior Turkish official said Monday.

Salah Abdeslam is wanted by police following the deaths of 129 people in the Paris terror attacks on Friday, during which Ibrahim Abdeslam blew himself up outside the cafe Comptoir Voltaire.

– The Paris attacks were planned in Syria and organized in Belgium, French President Francois Hollande said.

It comes as authorities revealed a rocket launcher was found during one of the anti-terror raids carried out at 168 locations leading to 23 arrests overnight. A few of the suspects have been linked to the bloody civil war raging in Syria that has enabled ISIS to thrive.

Belgium’s Interior Minister said Sunday the situation in Molenbeek is out of control.

The attacks have intensified debate on Europe’s response to the refugee crisis.

Valls warned that European countries face an ongoing risk of terrorist attacks.

Abdeslam is the brother of Brahim Abdeslam, a 31-year-old suicide bomber who died in Paris. A few have since been released, media reports said, including a brother of Salah Abdeslam, the suspect now the subject of a major manhunt. But the police let them go because there were no BOLOs (arrest warrants) for them.

One of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks had links to a Belgian Islamic State member believed to be the mastermind of a jihadist cell dismantled in January, a report said on Monday.

Police said the operation was related to the Paris attacks.

He was driving in the direction of the Belgian border a few hours after the attacks when officers stopped him, the source said. Now, his whereabouts are unknown. According to CNN, police blocked roads in the region and surrounded a building before using a megaphone to order someone to vacate the premises.

Five of the detainees were identified over the weekend, and on Monday another two were named by the Paris prosecutor as Ahmad al-Mohammad and Samy Amimour.

The raids were part of a national crackdown on extremism, but most were directly connected to Friday’s attacks. Suspicion is centering on next door Belgium where it is thought the explosives belts were made and the cars rented. But it’s not yet clear whether he was in the vehicle at the time of the attacks, the newspaper said.

Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism advisor to the White House and now an ABC News consultant, said the new unit reflected ISIS’s new focus on “complicated, commanded and controlled multi-actor” attacks, as opposed to earlier ISIS-linked attacks in the West, which were typically carried out by so-called lone wolves who were simply “inspired” by ISIS to violence. He was targeted in a 2012 terror investigation and placed under judicial supervision.

The French national was residing in Belgium.

Hadfi appears to have traveled to Syria in the spring of 2015, van Vlierden said, citing analysis of his social media postings and other communications. Authorities will be questioning “whether militants consider Belgium to be a more permissive environment” and whether there is “a community of extremists who can move relatively undetected”.

In the worst of Friday’s attacks, gunmen stormed the Bataclan theater during a rock concert, taking the audience hostage and firing on them repeatedly. Four were French, while the fifth man was fingerprinted in Greece in October and was possibly Syrian.

Police are also holding six of the man’s relatives.

“I’ll be very interested to see what types of phone devices they were carrying, what type of apps might have been on those devices”, NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said.