A Swedish man who is a key suspect in last month’s suicide bomb attacks on Brussels has been charged with taking part in November’s Paris attacks.
Osama Krayem, 23, who grew up with his Syrian family on an estate in Malmö, was charged earlier this month over the 22 March suicide blasts which killed 32 people in the Belgian capital’s airport and metro.
But the new charges in connection to the Paris attacks, announced on Wednesday, reflect growing links between one overarching terror group that planned both the Brussels and Paris atrocities.
Belgian prosecutors said Krayem had been charged with “terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group”.
The Paris attacks on bars, a rock concert and the national stadium left 130 dead on 13 November. Both they and the Brussels bombings were claimed by Islamic State.
Krayem was filmed on CCTV in Brussels on 22 March wearing a backpack and standing with the metro suicide bomber Khalid El Bakraoui at Pétillon station minutes before El Bakraoui blew himself up at Maelbeek metro station.
Krayem also planned to blow himself up on the metro but decided not to go ahead with it, his lawyer has told reporters. Investigators are still searching for the backpack he was wearing that day.
Krayem is also suspected of buying the bags used for the Brussels airport bombings. He was filmed on CCTV at the City2 shopping centre in the capital two weeks before the attacks buying two bags identical to those containing the explosives used in the bombings.
Investigators believe he was at various hideouts used by the terror cell behind the Paris and Brussels attacks. Belgian prosecutors said in a statement: “The investigation showed that he could be placed in different safehouses used by the terrorist group.”
These included a flat in Schaerbeek, also used by Mohamed Abrini, 31, who has confessed to being the third Brussels airport bomber, the “man in the hat” seen on CCTV footage. Abrini is also suspected of involvement in November’s Paris attacks.
Krayem had lived in Sweden since he was a child after his family left Syria and settled on the Rosengård estate in the southern city of Malmö. The diverse estate, which has battled high school dropout rates and unemployment, has produced several Swedish footballers including Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the son of a Bosnian caretaker and a Croatian cleaner, who grew up there.
When Krayem’s family settled in Sweden’s third city after leaving Syria, they were said to have been keen for their sons to swiftly integrate into Swedish life. Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper reported that when he was 11, Krayem featured in a documentary showing how sport helped immigrants integrate into the city. A football fan, he talked about how the local team had helped him settle in Sweden.
But – like other members of the Brussels-Paris terrorist cell – Krayem’s story as a teenager and young adult followed a familiar pattern: he became involved in petty crime, drug dealing and drug taking and liked “to party” before suddenly becoming radicalised and leaving for Syria.
Magnus Ranstorp, the research director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, described Krayem as a product of the “classic cocktail” of social exclusion, ideological radicalisation and criminality.
In 2014, Krayem appeared to have cleaned up his act. He had reportedly given up crime, quit drugs and drinking, stopped partying and had been working on leisure activities for the town hall as part of a young people’s training programme.
On the estate he was described as “ordinary”. Locals who knew his family told Swedish media he had gone to the mosque and prayed five times a day. No one suspected he could go to Syria to fight.
People who knew him described a sudden radicalisation in which he stopped seeing friends, grew a beard and seemed to change personality.
In January 2015, Krayem suddenly disappeared. It emerged he had gone to Syria when he posted a picture of himself on Facebook, dressed in combat fatigues holding a Kalashnikov rifle in front of an Islamic State flag. In February, his younger brother, Anas, whom he was close to, wrote on Facebook: “The hardest goodbyes are those that aren’t said and never explained. I miss you my brother!!”
Krayem’s aunt, Akhlass Daabas, told French TV station France 2: “No one was informed of his plans. Then one day a phone call came from abroad. He said: ‘I am with them. I won’t be coming back’.” According to family accounts in Swedish media, his mother had wanted to visit him in Turkey but her plans did not work out.
Nine months after arriving in Syria, Krayem returned to Europe. On 20 September 2015, he registered on the Greek island of Leros under the false name of Naïm al-Hamed, saying he was a 28-year-old Syrian. The Belgian prosecutor said that two weeks later, in October 2015, he was in the city of Ulm in Germany, where he was collected and brought to Belgium in a car hired by Salah Abdeslam.
Abdeslam, 26, a Brussels-based former petty criminal, is the leading surviving suspect in the Paris attacks and is in a Belgian prison awaiting transfer to France.
After the Brussels attacks, Krayem evaded police for two weeks as investigators sought the mysterious man who had been caught on CCTV talking to El Bakraoui moments before his bomb went off on the Brussels metro.
Krayem was finally arrested on 8 April in Laeken, Brussels – on the same day as Abrini.
Krayem was caught because he sent a Facebook message to his younger brother. Swedish police, who had his brother under surveillance, intercepted the message, leading to Krayem’s arrest.
The ongoing investigation has established connections between a large group of men – many of them childhood friends or brothers – who are suspected of playing roles in both the Paris and Brussels attacks, the two biggest terror attacks carried out in Europe by Isis.
Another suspected operative in the Paris attacks, Mohamed Belkaïd, a 35-year-old Algerian living illegally in Belgium who was shot in a raid in Brussels last month, had a connection to Sweden. He had married a Swedish woman and lived there for a time from 2010.
Krayem appeared on Wednesday before the pre-trial chamber of the Brussels court, which extended his prison detention for another month.
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