text: BRUSSELS Two weeks ago, the mayor of Molenbeek ordered the closure of a neighborhood bar where Brussels police had found young men dealing drugs and smoking dope over the summer. 
   
   Last Friday, the owner blew himself up at another laid-back corner cafe, this time in Paris, on a mission of retribution from Islamic State. 
   
   Brahim Abdeslam's journey from barkeeper to suicide bomber remains a mystery, along with the whereabouts of his younger brother Salah, now on the run as Europe's most wanted man but until recently the manager of Brahim's bar, Les Beguines. 
   
   The brothers sold the business just six weeks ago. 
   
   There is a seeming disconnect between the ownership by Muslims - whose religion forbids the use of alcohol and tobacco - of a bar, where drugs were being dealt, on a quiet street in the low-rent Brussels borough of Molenbeek who have become the focus of a manhunt for violent Islamists with ties to Syria. 
   
   Yet time and again, investigations after attacks like those that killed 129 people in Paris have uncovered tales of workaday Arab immigrant lives, assimilated to the profane daily cares and pleasures of European cities, that have turned, unseen to family and friends, into explosions of pious, suicidal fanaticism. 
   
   "It's shocking, especially when it's people you've hung out with," said 25-year-old Nabil, as he walked home from work to his apartment nearby, past the cafe on rue des Beguines, now shuttered by court order, which Brahim Abdeslam, 31, had owned. 
   
   "They were regular guys, who enjoyed a laugh," he said, still wearing his workclothes and a Nike baseball cap. "There was nothing radical about them. ... They were here just last week hanging out. ... I think they were indoctrinated. ... There is some mastermind behind it all." 
   
   "LIKE SYLVESTER STALLONE" 
   
   Hicham, also 25 and in blue tracksuit and sneakers, echoed that view of Brahim and Salah: "They smoked. They didn't go to the mosque or anything. We saw them every day at the cafe," he said. Brahim, with a voice "like Sylvester Stallone," could, he conceded, at times be "a bit crazy". 
   
   "We played cards. We talked about football," he added. "We talked about the everyday. Nothing jihadist, not about Islam." 
   
   Those sentiments were echoed by family including a third brother, a local council employee, who was released on Monday after two days in custody, and by former workmates of Salah at the tram repair shop - though the latter told public radio that the "joker" Salah lost that job in 2011 for absenteeism. 
   
   Belgian media also reported that Salah spent time in jail for robbery five years ago alongside another Molenbeek man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 28. French investigators believe Abaaoud may have ordered the Paris attacks from Syria, where he has become an Internet propagandist for Islamic State under the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Belgiki - the Belgian. 
   
   Belgian police could not confirm any previous record for the brothers or whether they had been under surveillance. 
   
   "STRONG SMELL OF DRUGS" 
   
   What is clear is that the bar the brothers ran had annoyed some of its neighbors and, in August, been raided by police. 
   
   Details posted on the door, on the ground floor of a typical brick-built 19th-century townhouse and confirmed by police to Reuters, stated: "The premises have been used for the consumption of banned hallucinogenic substances." 
   
   The notice ordered a five-month closure from Nov. 5, and said police found "a strong smell of drugs" and ashtrays containing "partially smoked joints", while a number of customers were found to be carrying drugs on their persons. 
   
   The notice said the manager had been given a chance, on Sept. 4, to object. "But he did not reply to our invitation". 
   
   Molenbeek Mayor Francoise Schepmans has described Molenbeek as a "breeding ground for radical violence", suffering from high youth unemployment and overcrowding. Belgian ministers have promised to "clean it up." 
   
   The Abdeslams do not appear to have figured among the jobless. Legal documents reviewed by Reuters and first reported by Belgian newspaper L'Echo show that Brahim, a French citizen born in Brussels, formed a company in March 2013 to run the bar. 
   
   In December that year, Brahim stepped aside as manager of the company in favor of Salah, but remained the main owner. Two other family members held small stakes at various times. 
   
   On Sept. 30 this year, after the closure warning, the family sold out to an individual who gave an address in southern Belgium. That person could not be contacted by Reuters. 
   
   The documents listed both brothers' address as the family home in a four-storey house facing Molenbeek town hall across a cobbled square. There, Mohammed Abdeslam, the brother held by police, told reporters the family were stunned by events. 
   
   "We've never had problems with the law," he said on the doorstep. "My parents are in shock and can't quite take in what's happened," he added, saying they had had no idea Brahim was going to Paris on Friday or where Salah now was. 
   
   According to French police, Brahim detonated a suicide vest at the Comptoir Voltaire, a cafe close to the Bataclan music hall where gunmen killed 89. The explosion seriously wounded several other people. 
   
   Salah, police say, rented a Volkswagen car that was found near the Bataclan with Belgian plates and he was later checked, but not arrested, near the Belgian border, in a car with two others. 
   
   GIVING A FRIEND A RIDE 
   
   A lawyer for Mohammed, who works for the town hall, said Mohammed was released because he had an alibi putting him in the French northern border city of Lille, where he was helping renovate a bar. 
   
   Lawyers say the two men in the car with Salah when he was stopped by French police early on Saturday near Cambrai are among three people in Belgian custody. The lawyer for one, Mohamed Amri, said he had taken a call from a friend saying he had broken down in Paris and drove south to fetch him. Amri said he had known nothing of any involvement in the attacks. 
   
   Outside Les Beguines, just over a mile from Molenbeek town hall, another acquaintance of the Abdeslam brothers, 23-year-old Amir, who works installing shop tills, said a friend had called him on Friday night asking him to drive the 280 km (180 miles) to Paris to pick up Salah. Amir told him he could not go. 
   
   He was told Salah offered to pay the fuel costs, but Amir did not want to run up such big mileage on his leased car. "It's incredible," he said of the arrests of those who did drive Salah. "It could have been me. ... I had no idea." 
   
   With television running hours of live coverage on Monday from the armed police siege of a house in Molenbeek in the hunt for Salah, his brother Mohammed stressed that Salah had been found guilty of nothing: "But with things as tense as they are," he said, "we don't know if he'll dare give himself up." 
   
   So what took Brahim from running a marijuana-scented beer joint named for a mediaeval order of Christian lay nuns to blowing himself up at a bar named for Voltaire, the 18th-century critic of religion? 
   
   His brother Mohammed had seen "absolutely nothing". Brahim and Salah were, he said, "two brothers who were totally normal". 
   
   (Additional reporting and writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Leslie Adler) ||||| A Paris suicide bomber drank, smoked and ran a drug den, friends who visited the bar he ran have said. 
   
   Ibrahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire café on Friday night during a terrorist rampage, enjoyed activities banned under Islamic law. 
   
   Abdeslam ran Les Beguines café in Rue des Beguines, Molenbeek, a poor district of Brussels notorious for Islamist extremism, from 2013 to August this year, when it was shut by the local commune due to drugs. It is now boarded up. 
   
   His brother Salah is now subject to an international manhunt, while another sibling, Mohammed, has been interviewed by police before being released. 
   
   A neighbour, who declined to be named, told the Telegraph: "Ibrahim was the proprietor, but the cafe is closed now. I used to go there every day after work, on my way home. We would go there to smoke hashish, drink alcohol, no problem. 
   
   “Ibrahim and I played cards together, we laughed and joked. He talked to everyone, he was very generous. I would have a drink and he would say don't worry about playing. I used to play cards with Salah too, he was often at the cafe. 
   
   “Ibrahim used to go to parties, he would drink alcohol, smoke. But he stopped drinking alcohol in the last year. 
   
   “Now I am scared because I talked to them, I know them. Everyone is disgusted and shocked. No one thought it was possible that it was them. " 
   
   Another man, aged 30, who lives just down the road from Les Beguines café said: “I used to play football with Salah, he played very well. He used to go out to a lot of parties. 
   
   "I also saw Ibrahim a lot at the cafe. They are good guys, like any other guys in this area." 
   
   A police raid in August found the bar was “used for the consumption of illegal hallucinogenic substances and had a strong smell of drugs and half smoked joints at the tables,” according to the closure order posted on the front door. 
   
   “The bar appears to be a point where you can buy and consume drugs, causing problems for the neighbourhood and public order in general,” the order said. 
   
   During the raid customers were found with drugs and five were booked by police for possession, the order said. 
   
   The requirement to close came into force last week but locals said Ibrahim had sold the bar after the police raid, and made “a lot of money”. 
   
   The Belgian newspaper L'Echo reported that Les Beguines cafe was set up by Ibrahim in March 2013, who remained the majority shareholder, according to company records. 
   
   His brother Saleh, who has been dubbed 'the most wanted manin Europe', was a manager at the cafe. 
   
   He chaired the most recent general meeting on September 30, documents reveal, at which he and another family member resigned from the business. 
   
   Ibrahim, who seriously injured a bystander when he detonated his suicide bomb, rented a Seat Leon used in the attacks. 
   
   The car was used by the terrorists who murdered diners outside the Casa Nostra pizza restaurant and the La Belle Équipe cafe. 
   
   It was later found abandoned with a cache of weapons inside. 
   
   The area has been described as an “airbase” for jihadists, and has been linked to plots including the 2004 Madrid bombing, the 2014 Jewish Museum shooting and this year’s botched attack on a Thalys commuter train. 
   
   Jan Jambon, the Belgian interior minister, this week vowed to “clean up” the area, saying that the government had lost control of it.
target: – Before they were suspects in the deadliest attack on French soil since WWII, brothers Brahim and Salah Abdeslam owned a bar called Les Beguines in Brussels, the Wall Street Journal reports. "I used to go there every day after work," a neighbor tells the Telegraph. "We would go there to smoke hashish, drink alcohol, no problem." A friend tells Reuters he would see the brothers at Les Beguines everyday. They would play cards and talk sports, he says. But Brahim and Salah sold the bar Sept. 30 for what locals say was "a lot of money," the Telegraph reports. Six weeks later, Brahim blew himself up outside a Paris cafe and Salah is on the run from a continent-wide manhunt. Authorities shut down Les Beguines, located in a heavily Muslim area of Brussels, on Nov. 5 after a police raid in August found patrons selling drugs and smoking marijuana, Reuters reports. And a neighbor tells the Journal the bar was "a rough hangout with regular fights and frequent visits by police." Brahim and Salah were reportedly known to police for drug violations despite the use of drugs—in addition to alcohol and tobacco—being banned in Islam. "The history of the two fits a pattern in which many Islamist terrorists in Europe have been radicalized from the ranks of petty criminals and drug users," the Journal states. And Reuters notes attacks are often carried out by people who were seemingly fully assimilated into the culture of Europe.