Salah Abdeslam managed to stay at liberty under the noses of police and despite a huge manhunt. While officials are celebrating his capture, there is acute discomfort at how long it took to find him

He was suspected of being a key figure in the Paris massacre that claimed 130 lives and, only hours after his dramatic arrest, Salah Abdeslam confessed to being just that.

The French public prosecutor, François Molins, revealed on Saturday that the 26-year-old had been charged with terrorism offences after telling investigators he was supposed to blow himself up at the Stade de France, where President François Hollande was watching France play Germany, but backed out at the last minute.

Molins sounded a cautionary note, however, saying Abdeslam’s alleged confession should be treated with care and needed to be verified. After his embarrassing escape, and ability to stay undetected under the noses of Belgian police for so long, the advice was understandable.

When the police net finally closed in on Abdeslam on Friday afternoon, after four months on the run, he was only a few minutes’ walk from his family home, in the troubled Brussels neighbourhood where he first sought refuge after the Paris attacks.

His capture was both a triumph and a humiliation. European police had taken the last surviving member of the Paris massacre team alive for questioning, likely to reveal critical details about the network behind the killings, its supporters and logistics. But they found him hiding virtually in plain sight, aided by close family friends, after evading capture for months.

The question hanging over both the people of Molenbeek, where he found a safe haven, and the authorities tasked with chasing Abdeslam, is how he had managed to stay on the run for so long. Helping him were supporters apparently so confident they could conceal Europe’s most wanted man from the authorities that one acted as coffin-bearer for the burial of Salah’s brother and fellow Paris attacker on Thursday.

Brahim Abdeslam had blown himself up at a cafe on Boulevard Voltaire during the Paris attacks, hours before Salah fled back to Molenbeek. After police eventually handed his remains to the family, they organised a burial. About a dozen friends and relatives attended the ceremony, among them Abid Aberkan, who would be arrested for helping shelter Salah hours after he carried Brahim on his final journey, Belgium’s La Libre newspaper reported.

The Abdeslam family said that they were “relieved” Salah had been captured, in a statement issued by their lawyer, who is also acting for Aberkan. That sentiment was echoed by the imam of a mosque just around the corner from Salah’s safe house, who insisted that he had no idea that the fugitive was on his doorstep. “The police here have done very well,” said Ahmed Abalhi. “He was like a virus among us. Before we were sick and now we have been cured.”

But not everyone in Molenbeek has so much respect for the authorities. Strained ties were on display in the hours after the arrests, when crowds of angry residents shouted obscenities at the police and smashed journalists’ satellite television trucks.

That distrust between the intelligence services and the people who might have seen Salah coming and going may have been one reason why he decided to risk staying in Belgium, even as several local media outlets reported that he had fled Europe. Police apparently had not even realised they were on Salah’s trail, after a four-month inquiry seemed to have gone cold. When they arrived at a flat in the sleepy southern suburb of Forest on Tuesday, they were only hoping to find some physical evidence. Instead they were greeted by a volley of automatic gunfire. A police sniper shot dead a would-be suicide bomber with links to the Paris killings.

Mohamed Belkaïd, a 35-year-old Algerian living illegally in Belgium, was found lying beside an Islamic State flag. Also inside the flat were Salah’s fingerprints; police eventually realised that the man himself had escaped with an accomplice only a few minutes earlier. It seemed like another disastrous near miss, but after four months on the run his network and luck were strained, and as he hunted for a new place to stay police were closing in.

By the end of the week, a tapped telephone had tied him to the house in Rue des Quatre-Vents where he was finally run to ground, and when news leaked out that his fingerprints had been found in Forest, police moved fast to seize him before he could flee again.

Abdeslam’s role in the Paris attacks became much clearer following his arrest and interrogation. Investigators established that Abdeslam had rented at least two vehicles used in the attacks, and had bought 12 remote detonators as well as 15l of peroxide used to fabricate the explosives. They believe Abdeslam drove three accomplices, suicide bombers who set off explosive vests outside the stadium after being refused entry.

However, his capture alone has not served to dispel criticism of Belgium’s security forces. Critics question not just why Salah stayed on the run for so long, but also how the Paris plotters, operating in an area with a history of violent extremism, escaped official scrutiny before launching the massacre. Alain Marsaud, a member of the centre-right Republicans party in France’s national assembly, told Le Soir that the “naivety of the Belgians had cost us 130 lives”, going on to criticise the Belgian authorities for their “inability to manage the problem” of radicalism.

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Mistrust of authority, a dense Muslim population, and a fractured police system inside Brussels have all helped to make Molenbeek an attractive base for Islamist radicals trying to escape scrutiny. A suspect in a thwarted attack on a high-speed train from Belgium to France was reported to have stayed at Salah’s sister’s house in Molenbeek, and a Frenchman accused of shooting dead four people last year at the Jewish Museum in Brussels also spent time in the area, according to the Reuters news agency.

The Belgian government has responded by promising a “clean-up”, and pledging police and funds for deradicalisation. But many residents in the area feel frustrated that they have been made scapegoats for the actions of a tiny minority, and say authorities show little interest in tackling exclusion and entrenched poverty that can fuel extremism, even though around one in three of the area’s young people is out of work.

“More often radicalisation is from broken families or failed lives, it’s not a question of religion, it’s social problems,” said Khalid, a 34-year-old barber who did not want to give his last name. “On paper they are Muslim, but they are not from a family with a religious background.”

That matches the profile of the Abdeslam brothers, who managed a bar together, and had run into trouble with the police before embracing radical Islam. Many of the shops around the district still carry signs from November that spell out the district name with a peace sign instead of an “o” – a battle to change a reputation entrenched with each new raid. But government promises to rein in Islamist extremism are unlikely to lead to quick results in a country that, per capita, has sent more fighters to Iraq and Syria than any other western European nation.

Both the French and Belgian governments have ignored ultra-conservative Salafist ideology that has taken root in some Muslim communities, said Claude Moniquet, a terrorism expert at the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre. “When you let this poison spread in society for 20 years, you cannot expect you will change things in one or two years,” he said.

The arrest of Salah has left Europe’s police with a new “most wanted” suspect for the Paris attacks, Mohamed Abrini, who was seen on CCTV footage with Salah at a petrol station just two days before the Paris attacks, and is now thought to have been part of a much larger planning network. He also grew up in Molenbeek, a neighbour of the brothers, and the latest addition to its gallery of missing, infamous sons.