Several Frenchmen held hostage by the Islamic State group in Syria between 2013 and 2014 have identified Najim Laachraoui as one of their jailers. Laachraoui, a suicide bomber who struck the Brussels airport on March 22, was known as "Abou Idriss" in the camp then, sources close to investigation told AFP.
Of the four French journalists kidnapped, Nicholas Henin "has formally identified" Laachraoui as Abou Idriss, confirmed his lawyer Marie-Laure Ingouf.
Belgian national Laachraoui travelled to Syria to join the Isis in 2013. But nothing was known of him until he was registered under a false name at the border between Austria and Hungary in September 2015.
On March 2016, the 24-year-old had struck the Belgium airport with two other suicide bombers, one of whom blew himself up on a metro train, killing 31 people in all.
Belgian prosecutors, who claim to have found his DNA on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, have also linked him to the Paris attack that killed 130 people. The concert hall blast alone had 90 victims.
On explosives used at State de France, another site of the attack and also the national stadium of France, police confirmed to have found his DNA.
With Laachraoui's DNA found across places, investigators have come to believe he was the bomb maker for both the Paris as well as the Brussels attacks.
The AFP report added that the French hostages had also identified two Frenchmen as being jailers at a camp in Syria.
