Paris (AFP) - France on Wednesday charged the main suspect in a foiled attack plot with membership of a terrorist organisation after police found an arsenal of weapons and explosives at his home.
The move comes as investigators stepped up efforts to smash a tangled web of Islamic State-linked extremists blamed for both the November Paris attacks and last week's suicide bombings on Brussels airport and metro that killed 32 people.
French national Reda Kriket, 34, was arrested near Paris last week and a police raid on his apartment netted a cache of assault rifles, handguns and TATP, the highly volatile homemade explosive favoured by IS jihadists.
Kriket's arrest came just four months after the jihadist carnage that claimed 130 lives in Paris.
He had rented the apartment in the suburb of Argenteuil under a false identity last summer, the prosecutor said.
Another French suspect, 32-year-old Anis Bahri, was arrested in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on Sunday in connection with the new Paris plot and is fighting extradition to France.
Both Kriket and Bahri are believed to have travelled to Syria in late 2014 or early 2015, and since then between France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the French prosecutor said.
Two other suspects -- Abderrahmane A., 38, and Rabah M., 34 -- have been charged in Belgium over the foiled plot and will be held for another week, Belgium's federal prosecutor said.
The arrests highlight the extensive links investigators are finding between French and Belgian Islamic State cells behind the Brussels and Paris attacks.
Kriket, who is linked to the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks, was found guilty in absentia in Brussels in July of being part of a jihadist recruitment network and sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Among those who went to Syria through the network were Abdelhamid Abaaoud -- the suspected ringleader of the November Paris onslaught -- and another Paris attacker, Chakib Akrouh.
- Brussels airport still closed -
Brussels airport said it would remain closed to passenger flights until at least late Thursday afternoon as the operator carries out further tests for a partial restart.
"The evaluation of the trial is still ongoing and will take at least till tomorrow afternoon. No flights till then," the airport operator said Wednesday on Twitter.
The airport has been shut since suicide bombers Najim Laachraoui and Ibrahim El Bakraoui blew themselves up in the departure hall on March 22.
The mayor of the Brussels district of Molenbeek, Francoise Schepmans, meanwhile, said far-right extremists had been banned from holding a planned anti-Islam rally in the neighbourhood after talks with police.
The impoverished immigrant neighbourhood has long been seen as a hotbed of Islamist extremism and the prime suspect in the November terror attacks in Paris was arrested there earlier this month.
Map of Europe detailing the latest arrests after French investigators say they foiled a planned attack (AFP Photo/Sabrina …
Prosecutors had charged the suspect, named by media as Faycal Cheffou, with "terrorist murder" and were investigating whether he was the third airport attacker who fled after his bomb did not detonate.
But the hunt is now back on for the so-called "man in the hat", seen in CCTV footage next to the two suicide bombers at the airport.
Belgium has been accused of missing a series of leads linking the Paris attacks to those behind the Brussels bombings.
In the most damning revelation, Turkey said Belgium ignored warnings from Ankara after it deported airport suicide bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui as a "terrorist fighter" last year following his arrest near the Syrian border.