REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, VIENNA -- Austrian police are trying to pin down the movements in Austria of a suspect in Friday's attacks in Paris, who entered the country from Germany in early September and told the authorities he was on holiday, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
A government official named the man as Belgian-born Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, 26, who escaped back to Belgium on Saturday after the attacks and eluded a police dragnet in the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek, where he lived with his two brothers.
The Austrian interior ministry said Abdeslam entered Austria from Germany on Sept. 9 with two other men who so far had not been named in connection with the attacks.
Abdeslam had attracted attention when the authorities stopped the vehicle he was travelling in.
"He said he was going on holiday in Vienna, but there are no further details yet," Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told ORF radio. "Now the question is where did he stay in Austria, and for what purpose."
One of Abdeslam's brothers died in the suicide bombings and shootings in Paris in which 129 people were killed. The other brother was arrested at the weekend, but later released.
French prosecutors have identified five of the seven dead assailants -- four Frenchmen and a foreigner fingerprinted in Greece last month. His role in the attacks has fuelled speculation that Islamic State (ISIS) took advantage of a wave of refugees fleeing Syria to slip militants into Europe.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have passed through Austria, the overwhelming majority on their way to Germany, in the past two months. Abdeslam was travelling in the opposite direction and was not posing as a refugee.
A series of people in Austria have, however, been convicted on terrorism charges, and the Interior Ministry says more than 200 people have travelled from the central European country to wage jihad in the Middle East.
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