Police in Málaga in southern Spain have arrested a Frenchman suspected of supplying weapons used in the attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 in which four people died.
French authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Antoine Denive on charges of arms trafficking and specifically for supplying Amedy Coulibaly, the Kosher supermarket gunman and hostage-taker, with the weapons he used. Denive, 27, is also charged with belonging to a criminal organisation.
He denies supplying arms to jihadis but said he was willing to face trial in France for the alleged offences.
From the town of Sainte Catherine, in the northern French département of Pas de Calais, Denive is thought to have left France several weeks after the attack and is suspected of having lived under a false identity in Rincón de la Victoria in Málaga.
Police arrested two other individuals, a Serb and a Montenegrin, when they raided his home, a statement from Spain’s interior ministry said.
Police suspect that the weapons may have been trafficked from the Balkans. False documents and a European passport not in Denive’s name were found in his home.
He was remanded in custody by high court judge Eloy Velasco. The attorney general’s office said it was not opposed to France’s extradition request but first needed to ascertain if Denive was wanted for arms trafficking or other offences in Spain.
Coulibaly was shot dead by French security forces after he killed a policewoman in Montrouge and then four other people at the kosher supermarket on 9 January 2015, two days after the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a video published online two days after his death.
Spanish police say Coulibaly had been in Spain on 2 January, a few days before the attack. He accompanied his wife and other relatives to Madrid airport where they boarded a flight to Istanbul.
On Wednesday Isis’s online magazine, Dabiq, published obituaries of the suicide bombers who killed 32 people last month in Brussels, confirming investigators’ suspicions that one of them had also made explosives for November’s Paris attacks, which hit the French capital 10 months after the attacks by Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers.
The latest issue of Dabiq also credited the other two, the Belgian El Bakraoui brothers, with a lead role in organising the November Paris attacks.
Najim Laachraoui, a 25-year-old Belgian who blew himself up at Brussels airport on 22 March, had “travelled the long road to France” after fighting in Syria since 2013, the magazine said.
“It was Abu Idris who prepared the explosives for the two raids in Paris and Brussels,” it added, using Laachraoui’s nom de guerre and calling him “very intelligent”.
Laachraoui’s fingerprints were found on suicide vests used in Paris on 13 November and at a Brussels apartment where militants had made a homemade explosive known as TATP. It was from there that he and two other men took a taxi to the airport.
One of them was the other airport suicide bomber, Brahim El Bakraoui, 29, an armed robber on parole. Dabiq said he had become a believer while in prison and on his release, with his brother Khalid, had bought weapons and made plans for an attack.
Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, who blew himself up on a metro train at Maelbeek station in Brussels’ EU district, also took up the cause in prison, the article said, describing him as a “natural leader” who had a “vivid, life-changing dream” while jailed for a carjacking.
Along with notes on the three suicide bombers, Dabiq published an account of Mohamed Belkaid, a 35-year-old Algerian who was shot dead by police on 15 March in a raid on an apartment in the Brussels suburb of Forest. That raid was the first in a chain of events that included the Brussels attacks and more arrests.
Belkaid had reached Europe from Syria with Laachraoui, the article said, confirming investigators’ conclusions that the two men had travelled together posing as Syrian refugees last summer and were driven to Belgium by Salah Abdeslam, a prime suspect in the Paris attacks who was arrested three days after the Forest raid.
