Swedish national Osama Krayem, charged with terrorist murders over the Brussels metro bombing, is remembered back home as an idle youth who smoked and drank before suddenly turning radical and heading off to wage jihad in Syria.
The son of Syrian exiles from the Rosengard district of the southern Swedish city of Malmo, where football great Zlatan Ibrahimovic also grew up, Krayem was arrested yesterday in Brussels with Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini and several other men.
Belgian prosecutors said today that Krayem is the man caught on closed circuit television cameras speaking briefly to Khalid El Bakraoui moments before the latter blew himself up in a subway station near the European Union headquarters in Brussels on March 22.
Krayem, 23, was also said have been caught on camera buying bags in a Brussels shopping mall that were used to carry the suicide bombs that Khalid's brother Ibrahim and fellow suicide bomber Najim Laachraoui, believed to be the bomb maker, set off at Brussels airport on the same day.
Thirty-two people were killed in the twin attacks.
Osama Krayem is the product of a "now classic cocktail of social marginalisation, ideological radicalisation" and criminality, Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on radical Islamist movements at the Swedish National Defence College, told AFP.
In Malmo, people close to him described Krayem as an ordinary but idle young man from a working class neighbourhood who took part in petty crime in between bouts of drug taking and worship.
"He visited the mosque with his friends, as usual," a man close to the family told the Aftonbladet daily.
"He prayed five times per day. Nobody suspected he would go fight in Syria," he added.
"He comes from an ordinary family of Swedish Muslims. His father does not approve and his mother has been so sad since he left for Syria that she took ill," the family friend was quoted as saying.
A personal friend of Krayem recalled how the young man lived it up in the Seved neighbourhood which has a reputation for drug trafficking.
But he adopted healthier habits after he started working as part of a job training programme in recreation centres in his hometown.
He stayed there for a year before leaving to wage jihad in Syria, his parents' native country.
His radicalisation came "suddenly, unexpectedly," another person close to Krayem told the Sydsvenskan newspaper.
