The Austrian government has extradited a pair of Islamic State fighters suspected of having ties to the perpetrators of the Paris Bataclan massacre last November.
Government officials in Austria have announced the immediate extradition of a pair of migrants suspected of being Islamic State fighters who are part of a much larger terror network. The migrants will be sent to France as they are suspected of having connections to the attackers who killed 130 people, mostly at the Bataclan nightclub in central Paris. The process of extradition has taken over eight months and has finally been approved, Wiener Zeitung Online reports.
Both migrants, a 35-year-old Pakistani national named Muhammed U., and an unnamed 29-year-old Algerian asylum seeker, were caught in December of last year a month following the Paris terror attacks. According to officials the pair have direct links to the terror cell that carried out the massacre and are believed to be members of Islamic State.
The allegations of involvement in the terror attacks come after months of investigation by prosecutors in Salzburg where the pair were initially arrested. While the extradition of the Algerian suspect has already been made final earlier this month, the prosecutor noted that the Pakistani suspect had appealed the court’s ruling to send him to France. Wednesday’s ruling in the Higher Regional Court of Linz has confirmed that the Pakistani man will be joining the Algerian as his appeal was rejected outright.
The migrants are only the latest asylum seekers or illegal migrants to have been arrested in connection with the Paris attacks. Breitbart London revealed, only days after the attacks, that two of the gunmen had come into Europe via the Balkan route of illegal migrants. The Greek government confirmed suspicions that the pair had come into Europe posing as refugees with Syrian passports after a passport was found at the scene of the terror attack.
More recently the Belgian government has warned that there could be an increase in terror attacks as Islamic State fighters migrate from Syria to Europe posing as asylum seekers. The Belgian security services claimed that the group of fighters had left Syria and split into two separate cells heading for both France and Belgium. The terrorists are said to be equipped with weapons and the Belgian authorities warned that terror attacks could be imminent.
Last month also saw the arrest of several Syrian migrants in Germany who were planning to commit a terror attack in Dusseldorf. At least three members of the Islamic State cell were arrested while planning what German police called a Paris-style attack. The failed bomber in Ansbach, Germany, another Syrian, was also revealed to have come to Germany as an asylum seeker.