Brother of Paris Terrorist Speaks Out

On Tuesday, the brother of missing Paris terrorist suspect Salah Abdeslam called on his sibling to surrender to authorities. Speaking to France's BFM TV, Mohamed Abdeslam — who was briefly arrested in Belgium on Saturday in connection with the grisly Paris attacks, but subsequently released without charge — suggested that his brother should turn himself in.

Evidently I advise him to surrender to the police ... We are family, we are thinking of him, we are asking ourselves where he is, whether he is afraid. But the right thing to do would be to surrender to justice.

This isn't the first public comment Mohamed has given on the situation. That came on Saturday, after he was released by Belgian authorities and told reporters that his family learned about the attacks on television, the same way everybody else did:

My family and I are very moved by what's happened. We found out about it from the television as many of you did. And we never thought that one of my brothers could be linked to this attack.

Salah isn't the only member of the Abdeslam family believed to have taken part in the horrifying night of violence Paris suffered on Friday. Mohamed's other brother, Brahim, committed a suicide bombing that night. Mohamed was arrested in the aftermath of the attacks for fear that he had been involved, but he was proven to have been renovating a bar in the French city of Lille during the attack.

In all, French authorities suspect that there could be as many as 20 different people involved in plotting out the Paris attacks, although Salah Abdeslam is undeniably the name at the top of everyone's lists right now, because he's the only suspected attacker whose whereabouts are entirely unaccounted for. According to the BBC, he was reportedly stopped by the police in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, but for whatever reason, he wasn't arrested.

As the BBC detailed, French authorities have characterized Salah as dangerous, and have cautioned against approaching him. His whereabouts remain a mystery — in his post-release remarks to reporters on Saturday, Mohammed said that his family "[doesn't] know where he is or have any information."