Third suspect was banned from refugee camp

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The Brussels Airport suicide bombers (left and right) pictured with the so called man in white (centre)

The man who Belgian authorities this weekend said they suspect of being the third attacker at Brussels airport was banned from coming near a refugee camp in the city’s centre last year following concerns he was trying to radicalise asylum-seekers.

Fayçal Cheffou, who has been charged with terrorist murders in the Brussels bombings, was ordered to steer clear of the area around Parc Maximilien, the scene of a makeshift camp that sprung up in September amid Europe’s refugee influx, according to local media.

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The camp was run by volunteers and non-governmental organisations to give migrants a place of shelter and assistance while they waited for their appointments at the asylum office. Yves Mayeur, mayor of central Brussels, said he repeatedly flagged Mr Cheffou to judicial authorities.

One person who knew Mr Cheffou at the camp told the Brussels daily Le Soir that he was “aggressive, proselytising, someone who loved power and had delusions of grandeur”.

“Everyone knew that there was a problem between Fayçal and the citizen’s platform” that was running the camp, another person told broadcaster RTL.

Mr Cheffou “was saying that they [camp organisers] were collaborators with immigration authorities, that they were in direct contact with the police. He was a paranoiac,” the man told RTL.

Mr Cheffou, the so-called “man in white” in the photo of the Brussels airport suicide bombers, is the only person charged with murder in connection with the Belgian investigation into the terrorist attacks; the Belgian prosecutor has charged a second man with working with a terrorist group and a third was charged yesterday with assisting a thwarted plot in Paris.

Investigators said their working assumption is that Mr Cheffou is the “man in white,” pictured in CCTV footage at the airport pushing a luggage trolley alongside the two suspected suicide bombers, Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui.

[Cheffou was] aggressive, proselytising, someone who loved power and had delusions of grandeur

Prosecutors’ believe he fled the scene after leaving a suitcase bomb at the airport. However, it failed to go off until after the area had been cleared.

Unlike the other men involved in the Brussels plot, Mr Cheffou appears to have no connections with either November’s attacks in Paris or links to Islamic State militants. Still, local media reported he had previous run-ins with law enforcement dating back more than a decade.

Mr Cheffou was arrested on Thursday evening outside the headquarters of the federal prosecutors’ office in the city’s government district. He was seized while driving his Citroen C4 with two passengers who were subsequently released without charge. The fact he was arrested as he approached the building suggests he was already under surveillance.

While prosecutors believe he was with the suicide bombers at the airport, there were also unconfirmed reports in Belgian media about his presence at Maelbeek metro station – the other scene of Tuesday’s bombings.

Flemish paper Het Nieuwsbald said on Saturday that a policeman spotted him there, while the Brussels daily La Libre Belgique reported he had been identified by several witnesses as having been at the scene.

Some accounts have described Mr Cheffou as a freelance journalist, but the only evidence of such work to come to light is a six-minute YouTube video where he speaks to a camera outside an asylum seekers’ reception centre, close to Zavantem airport, where a protest by Muslim detainees was underway.

In the clip, Mr Cheffou gives his name and attempts to interview one of the officials at the centre, via intercom. The report says that those inside the facility were protesting against food being served in daytime during Ramadan, when meals can only be taken at night or before sunrise.

“These people find themselves without food, completely forgotten by the rest of the world … I find this completely disrespectful of human rights,” he says in the clip, published on July 21, 2014 on a YouTube channel called Les Opprimés, or The Oppressed.

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Third suspect was banned from refugee camp