Salah Abdeslam

Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks has been charged on April 21 with attempted murder over a shootout in Brussels, Belgium, with police last month.

The attackers who struck Brussels on March 22 initially planned to launch a second assault on France, Belgium’s Federal Prosecution Office said Sunday.

Abdeslam, the last member of the 10-man ISIS cell that orchestrated the Paris shootings in November, which killed 130 people, had managed to evade the Belgian police for months, and even managed to briefly become Europe’s most wanted man.

The top suspect in last year’s Paris attacks told investigators after he was captured that he was planning new operations from Brussels and possibly had access to several weapons

Brahim Abdeslam seemed no different from his peers in Molenbeek, one of Belgium’s poorest districts, where drug use is rife and many of the young men are unemployed. One November evening, he passed the time smoking pot in a parked car with two of his friends.

French police hunted Tuesday for a 2nd terrorist believed to have escaped after the bomb and gun massacres in Paris, while a U.S. official revealed that the suspected mastermind was part of an Islamic State cell that American intelligence agencies had been tracking for months.