Salah Abdeslam: The Suicide Bummer

They often saw him in the club, the clean-shaven 26-year-old who enjoyed smoking joints and chatting with other men. He was in the gay sex bar in central Brussels as recently as one month ago, and nobody who saw him lounging comfortably there could have imagined for a moment that he was about to become the most wanted man in Europe.

The handsome youth with a taste for hashish has since been identified as Salah Abdeslam, suspected of being part of the terrorist unit that killed 130 people in Paris last weekend. The attackers were hailed in jihadist circles as martyrs, yet for regulars at the men-only clubs in the Saint-Jacques quarter of central Brussels, Abdeslam was just another pot-smoking party-goer.

“We had him down as a rent boy, he was always hanging out with that kind of crowd,” said Julien, the bartender of a club Abdeslam visited last month. The owners of the club, who spoke to The Sunday Times on condition that they not be identified, recognised Abdeslam’s picture in the aftermath of the attacks and immediately alerted the police, who are now studying CCTV footage of the area.

Isis, which has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, regards homosexuality as evil and routinely punishes suspected gay people by throwing them off high buildings or stoning them to death. Adulterers have been decapitated, drinkers and smokers have been maimed or flogged.

Jihadist with Attitude?

 Abdeslam’s enthusiasm for Brussels nightlife made him an improbable Isis recruit, yet French police are now certain he played a key role in renting two of the cars used by the attackers. He is believed to have participated in the assaults on restaurants close to the Bataclan theatre, where most of the victims died.

Abdeslam’s 31-year-old brother, Brahim, seems an equally unlikely jihadist. He ran a bar in the Brussels district of Molenbeek that was shut down by police a week before the attacks for the illegal sale of drugs.

“Brahim and Salah spent most of their days smoking hashish and playing on PlayStation in the bar,” Karim, 25, one of the brothers’ closest friends, told The Sunday Times. “There was nothing to suggest they were radicalised.”

Brahim joined his brother for the restaurant assaults. He eventually blew himself up on the street, but Salah disappeared and is now the subject of the biggest hunt in French police history, with 2,000 officers assigned to the case...

Sunday Times - then goes on forever with the usual speculative padding thought to constitute 'investigative reporting'.

Told ya so!

Though as no-one is identified - which would be quite understandable in this instance, admittedly - all of the above may be made-up.

But I think he's got a gayface, and that's good enough for me.

PS Fagburn was also AGAIN the first to connect all this to the DEADLY CHEMSEX CRAZE! (Though I was being sarcastic).

Paris shootings - Is Chemsex to blame? Full shocking report in Attitude, QX and The Guardian.

— Read Fagburn (@Fagburn) November 14, 2015

Paris Massacre: Was deadly chemsex craze to blame? pic.twitter.com/2wa4iFm52y

— Read Fagburn (@Fagburn) November 17, 2015

Update: Mail Online readers on top form today!

'It's been noted before that alot of the terrorists are gay, and while there is nothing wrong with this...' etc etc.