A man convicted of terrorism in Belgium has been arrested in Bulgaria as he entered the country via its border with Turkey, Bulgarian authorities were announced on Thursday.

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He was arrested on Wednesday during a special operation led by the special services and the border police, the Bulgarian public prosecutor’s office said in a statement. According to this press release, he was wanted “in connection with a 20-year prison sentence for terrorism received from a court in a European countryAnd another nine years and five months sentence received in Turkey. Contacted by AFP, prosecutors declined to give more details.

The Bulgarian media presented the man as Yassine Lachiri, allegedly close to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November 13 attacks in Paris in 2015. A source close to the investigation confirmed to AFP that he was It was from Yassine Lachiri. A spokesperson for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office told AFP that an extradition request was in preparation. “A person has been arrested whose surrender we are requesting“, He told AFP.

Yassine Lachiri was sentenced in 2015 to 20 years in prison in absentia by a court in Brussels, as part of the trial of a jihadist recruitment network in Belgium. According to the Belgian press, Yassine Lachiri, who also has Moroccan nationality, was stripped of his Belgian nationality in absentia in 2020.