Abdesalem Lassoued , the Tunisian attacker who killed two people in Brussels yesterday, arrived in Lampedusa in 2011 on board a small boat . He had used another alias, the Digos of the Agrigento Police Headquarters ascertained the fact through the examination of fingerprints. After a stay in Italy and an asylum request presented in Turin, he went to Sweden, from where he appears to have been expelled.
Having returned to Italy, in 2016 he was identified in Bologna (where he had gone to request admission to the international protection programme ) as radicalized : he had expressed the desire to join the jihad and leave to fight. The man was also monitored by intelligence. He later went to Belgium.
It cannot be ruled out that yesterday he hit two Swedes due to the discontent he felt towards the country from which he had been expelled.
« We live for religion and we die for religion. I am ready to meet God happy and serene ", this is how the man claimed his crazy crusade on social media.
An escalation of threats culminated in yesterday's extreme gesture: the attack on the three Swedish citizens in the heart of Brussels, the long escape into the night, then the arrest and death in a firefight with the police.
Born in 1978, the man was monitored by federal authorities and well known to the services. In 2019 he applied for asylum in Belgium, a request rejected a year later . At that moment he disappeared from the radar. On 12 February 2021 his name was removed from the municipality's national register. The order to leave the country, also issued in 2021, never became operational. In the same year the man was photographed in Genoa, in Piazza della Vittoria .
The ROS carabinieri, together with the Bologna judicial authority and Digos, are investigating to reconstruct the route taken in Italy by the Tunisian attacker and trace his network of acquaintances in our country.
In recent months he would have continued to live in Schaerbeek , the same neighborhood where Najim Laachraoui, one of the attackers of Brussels international airport in 2016, lived. And a handful of kilometers from Molenbeek, the refuge of Salah Abdeslam, among the murderers of the massacre of the Bataclan, in November 2015.
In the hours preceding the murder of the two Swedes, on his Facebook account - where the man's profile bears the name of Slayem Slouma - the attacker first shot a video in which, with his face hooded, he declared that " the book of Allah it's a red line to sacrifice yourself for ." Then, immediately after the attack, another video appeared on the same account. With his face uncovered, the man claimed membership in ISIS and the attack. « I took revenge for the Muslims. I have killed three Swedes now ."
(Unioneonline/L)