Even his own family wanted the Paris mastermind dead: He was privately educated and spoilt by his parents. Yet nightclub-loving playboy spurned it all to spread hatred and slaughter
By David Jones In Brussels For The Daily Mail
Spoilt: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national who grew from a 'fine young boy' who made his parents proud into an ISIS killer who masterminded the Paris attacks
Growing up in a dilapidated Brussels cul-de-sac dubbed 'International Street' — because almost every family who lived there had come from a different country — the boy in the navy-blue baseball cap stood out as a beacon of hope.
The son of an enterprising Moroccan, who had bought a dirt-cheap house in the canal-side slums and turned its front-parlour into a thriving secondhand clothes shop, Abdelhamid Abaaoud was sharp and engaging, and his flint-black eyes flashed with zest.
Yesterday, ruefully recalling how the youthful 'Hamid' had become an emblem of his immigrant community's aspirations, one Serbian neighbour said he always called him 'captain' — an image enhanced by his jaunty peaked hat.
'Among all the children of different nationalities who played on this street, Moroccans, Macedonians, Turks, Serbs, French, Spanish, Belgians, he was the leader,' Dragic Zivancevic, 70, told me.
'Back then, he was a fine young boy and his mother and father were so proud of him. You can look as hard as you like, but you will find nothing in his past that remotely explains the terrible things he has done.'
Perhaps he is right. By his mid-20s, however, it was patently clear that Abaaoud would never fulfil his early promise.
After drifting into petty crime and serving a prison sentence, he brought disgrace and heartbreak on his family by journeying to Syria to join Islamic State.
Worse, he spirited his 13-year-old brother, Younes, away with him to become the jihadists' youngest known recruit. When she learned what he had done, his mother, Badi, 64, sank into a depression and fell ill. Racked with shame, she has since returned to live in Morocco.
His father, Omar, 65, is seldom seen on 'International Street' these days, either, and had publicly disowned Abaaoud long before he was revealed to be the evil architect of last weekend's Paris atrocities.
Last autumn, when the family received reports that he had been 'martyred' while fighting for IS, his older sister Yasmina — who has succeeded where her brother so abjectly failed, and now has a good career and lives in an affluent area of Brussels — went further.
'We are praying that he really is dead,' was her reaction.
Her prayers, and doubtless those of the West's security forces, went unanswered. As we know, the reports were wrong and 27-year-old Abaaoud was very much alive.
It now seems clear that ISIS had faked his death as a ruse, so that he could sneak back into Western Europe and plot his murderous terror campaign.
Kingpin: Abaaoud fled Belgium for Syria and has become an ISIS executioner, recruiter and trainer and one of the world's most wanted men
A campaign that appeared to have reached its bloody denouement yesterday, when, according to reports last night, he was killed by French commandos during the dramatic raid on a terrorist lair in the Paris suburb of St Denis.
So how did the bright boy in the blue cap become a fanatical and utterly ruthless terrorist mastermind?
The story starts more than 40 years ago, when his father migrated to Belgium to find work, like thousands of Moroccans at that time.
The once-fine Brussels suburb of Molenbeek had, by then, fallen into ruin, and its white Belgian residents had moved to more salubrious districts, so the incomers were encouraged by the local authority to take over its dilapidated terraces.
With the aid of a loan or grant, neighbours recall, Omar Abaaoud snapped up one of the most prized houses — a three-storey, stone-built corner property, where he and his wife Badi, also of Moroccan stock, raised their children and opened the humble clothes stall.
As he grew more prosperous, he bought a bigger shop in the Rue Prado, now a bustling North African-style shopping bazaar, where traders hawk tagines, spices and chintzy household goods just off the handsome main square.
The young Abaaoud helped out in the store, which offered cheap Western 'fashion' clothes, in contrast to the surrounding shops, selling traditional Muslim robes and head-dresses.
'The family weren't religious at all,' a Turkish woman tasked with keeping an eye on their now-empty house told me yesterday.
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