News in English

8. April 2017, 21:58

Paris attacks suspect will not fight extradition

The lawyer for the Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam says he will not fight extradition from Belgium to France because he wants to "explain himself." Abdeslam was arrested and wounded in a police raid in Brussels on Friday. Terrorism expert George Joffe says it´s a surprising about-turn: "Apparently he originally didn´t want to return to France because he feared he´d be much more severely treated there by the courts than he would have been in Belgium. It does suggest that he may have done a deal with the Belgian investigators that he will repeat in France that will ease his sentence."

Belgian police hunt surviving airport bomber

Belgian police have stepped up the search for a fourth suspect in the Brussels attacks, who survived because his explosives did not detonate until after the airport had been evacuated. Two of the suicide bombers who died at the airport and the metro station have been named as brothers Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, Belgian nationals. Unconfirmed reports say another of the airport suicide attackers was the wanted jihadist Najim Laachraoui, whose DNA was found on explosives linked to November´s attacks in Paris. Meanwhile, Belgian and French media are reporting that a second person is believed to have been involved in the attack on the metro. It´s also emerged that the dead metro bomber Ibrahim el-Bakraoui had been deported from Turkey twice last year. Turkey says it warned both Belgium and the Netherlands that he was a "foreign terrorist fighter."

US Secretary of State in Moscow for talks

The US Secretary of State John Kerry has called for countries to boost efforts to fight the so-called Islamic State group in Syria, Iraq and beyond in the wake of Brussels attacks. Kerry is in Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Syria and Ukraine.

Syrian troops enter Palmyra

Syrian State television is reporting that Syrian troops have entered the ancient town of Palmyra, which has been held by IS militants since May. The Syrian army is hoping to open a road to the mostly IS-held eastern province of Deir al-Zor. The recapture of Palmyra would be one of the Syrian government´s most important successes.

Karadzic faces Bosnian war crimes verdict

The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague is set to announce a verdict today in one of the most important trials since the second World War, the case of Radovan Karadzic. The former Bosnian Serb leader has denied being responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

The weather

Isolated rain or snow showers, but some sunshine in the south. Top temperatures from 3 to 12.

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