French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin praised the arrest. “I am delighted that Iquioussen was arrested today by the Belgian services, which I thank very much,” he told the French news agency AFP.
It was the same minister who had requested the expulsion of the controversial imam to Morocco. At the end of August, his expulsion was approved by the French Council of State. However, the police did not find him at his home in Lourches, near Valenciennes, in northern France. The French investigators quickly assumed that Iquiousen had probably fled to Belgium.
France therefore issued a European arrest warrant against Iquioussen. “This man is not allowed to stay in Belgium,” said State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Nicole De Moor (CD&V) on Twitter. “That means that we are working with the judiciary to remove him from the territory.”
In recent weeks, the file has become a symbol file in the French fight against “separatist discourse”.
Hassan Iquioussen is said to have been close to the Muslim Brotherhood and, according to court documents, spoke out against the lay state, incited “a sort of separatism”, fueled “conspiracies about Islamophobia” and “developed anti-Semitic theories”.
The 58-year-old imam was born in France, but has Moroccan nationality.