Belgian Arms Dealer Confesses To Supplying Paris Attackers

Belgian authorities have detained a man for arms dealing and are investigating whether he supplied one of the Islamist gunmen who together killed 17 people in Paris last week, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Belgian media reported that a man turned himself in to police in the southern city of Charleroi on Tuesday, saying he had been in touch with Amedy Coulibaly, the militant who took hostages in a Jewish supermarket in the French capital and was later killed by security forces.

Police officers have searched his home and allegedly found documents relating to negotiations over the sale of arms. According to police officials, the Scorpion machine gun and the Tokarev handgun used by Coulibaly during his attack on the kosher supermarket which resulted in the deaths of four Jewish Parisians came from Brussels and Charleroi.

The man said that he also swindled Coulibaly in a car sale, but police later found evidence that the two were negotiating about the sale of ammunition for a 7.62 mm caliber firearm. Bullets of this caliber are needed for the Tokarev pistol that Coulibaly used in his attack on the supermarket in Paris, where he killed four hostages, and possibly in the shooting and injuring of a jogger two days earlier.

The Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers used by the Kouachi brothers in the Charlie Hebdo attack, killing 12, were purchased by Coulibaly near the Gare du Midi in Brussels for less than $5,867 (€5,000/£3,870).

"The man is being held by the judge in Charleroi on suspicion of arms dealing," a spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecution said. "Further investigations will have to show whether there is a link with the events in Paris," he added.

Meanwhile the search continues for France's most wanted woman, Hayat Boumedienne, Coulibaly's common-law wife, who is believed to have crossed the border to Spain in order to fly from Istanbul where she later crossed into Syria.

(Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Crispian Balmer)