Europe 1 with AFP // Photo credit: BENOIT DOPPAGNE / Belga / AFP 15:27 p.m., October 27, 2023

Spanish police announced on Friday that they had arrested a person in the province of Malaga suspected of involvement in the October 16 attack in which two Swedes were killed. The authorities have not provided any information on his identity or nationality. The perpetrator of the attack was shot dead by the Belgian police.

Spanish police said on Friday they had arrested a person suspected of involvement in the October 16 attack in Brussels, in which two Swedes were killed, without providing details about his identity and nationality. "National police officers arrested in Benahavis," in the southern province of Malaga, "a person because of his involvement in the jihadist attack on October 16 in Belgium" and who was the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the Belgian authorities, the police said in a statement.

The suspect was placed under judicial supervision

The perpetrator of the attack, a radicalized Tunisian, was shot dead by Belgian police. The suspect arrested in Spain was the subject of an arrest warrant for "drug trafficking, arms trafficking, money laundering and membership of a criminal organisation". He was in possession of false identity documents at the time of his arrest, the statement added. This person was under investigation after the Belgian authorities reported his "possible link with the perpetrator of the attacks".

"The investigation determined how the two were linked by illicit activities related to organized crime," police said. The suspect was placed under judicial supervision. He is not the first person arrested in this investigation: two Tunisians living in the Paris region were arrested on Monday and then placed in pre-trial detention. The investigation has yet to clarify their links to the assailant.

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Then three days later, a 44-year-old Tunisian man was arrested in Belgium on suspicion of complicity with the bomber. He was charged with "murder in a terrorist context" and then imprisoned. The October 16 attack in Brussels, perpetrated with "an AR-15 type weapon of war" according to the prosecutor's office, killed two Swedes, a man in his sixties and a man in his seventies, who had come to support their national football team playing that evening against Belgium in Brussels. A third Swedish fan, aged 70, was also seriously injured.