Saint-Gilles apartment served as 'factory' for false documents

Italian police on Saturday arrested an Algerian man who is accused of providing fake identity documents to terrorists, including Salah Abdeslam and Najim Laachraoui. The documents appear to have been manufactured in an apartment in the Brussels commune of Saint-Gilles, where forging equipment and hundreds of false identity papers were discovered, writes Brusselnieuws.

Belgian police raided the apartment in Saint-Gilles a month before the Paris attacks in November last year, in the context of a major investigation into forged documents, writes Politico. Investigators found 600 documents with a connection to the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels.

The 'documents factory', as police refer to it, was allegedly run by Jamal Eddine Ouali, an Algerian man who was arrested on Saturday in southern Italy. At the time of the raid, the tiny Saint-Gilles apartment was full of “computers and ID card printers, a hot press, as well as hundreds of fake ID cards, Belgian social security cards, and Belgian driving licenses of excellent quality,” according to Ouali’s arrest warrant obtained by Politico.