Belgium: eight arrested on suspicion of “terrorist attacks”


Belgian flags fly at half mast at the central train station in Brussels, Belgium, on March 23, 2016. PATRIK STOLLARZ / AFP

Several “radicalized young people” from the jihadist movement have been arrested, announces the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office.

Eight people from the jihadist movement were arrested Monday evening March 27 in Belgium as part of two investigations into suspicions of a terrorist attack whose potential targets have not been determined at this stage.

This double dragnet, in investigations opened for a few months in Antwerp and Brussels, was announced this Tuesday morning by the federal prosecutor’s office, in charge of terrorism and organized crime.

“Very young radicalized”

There was talk of a planned attack in each of two files, which include “links between them“, we said from the same source. According to a judicial source contacted by AFP, the arrested are “very young radicalizedof the jihadist movement. Five searches were carried out in Molenbeek (Brussels region), Eupen (East) and in Dutch-speaking Belgium (North) in the three Antwerp districts of Merksem, Borgerhout and Deurne, as part of the first case, investigated in Antwerp.

They resulted in five arrests, and at least two of these five suspects are suspected of having “prepared to carry out a terrorist attack in Belgium“. In the second investigation, led by an investigating judge from Brussels, three suspects were arrested in Molenbeek, Schaerbeek (another Brussels municipality) and in Zaventem, very close to the capital. These people are also suspected of having prepared an attack on Belgian soil. According to RTBF, the Antwerp and Brussels surveys initially targetedtwo young adults suspected of violent radicalism“.

Belgium, target of the Islamic State

Belgium was the target of attacks claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group which left 32 dead and more than 340 injured on March 22, 2016, which is worth ten men (including one absent, presumed dead in Syria) of to be judged currently at the assizes. That morning, a double suicide attack devastated the departures hall of Brussels-Zaventem airport. It was followed, an hour later in the metro in the European capital, by a third also perpetrated by a suicide bomber carrying explosives.

These attacks were carried out by the jihadist cell already at the origin of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in France (130 dead). A group which was formed and prepared for the most part on Belgian soil, around a core of jihadists from the Brussels municipalities of Laeken and Molenbeek (this is the case of the Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, one of the ten accused in the trial of attacks of March 22, 2016).

A “present” threat

For seven years, Belgium has also experienced several deadly attacks against members of the forces targeted by radicalized people. In November 2022, a 29-year-old police inspector was fatally stabbed in the neck in Brussels by a man who shouted “God is great“. The suspect, Yassine M., a radicalized ex-prisoner, was charged with “assassination in a terrorist context“.

The terrorist threatremains present, with planned attacks that are regularly avoided by our services“, declared on March 24 to RTBF the head of the federal judicial police Éric Snoeck. In its last annual report published in January, the State Security (civil intelligence) said for its part that “a worrying radicalization of increasingly young people» in terms of «extremist and religious ideology“. On Tuesday, Ocam, the federal agency responsible for analyzing the terrorist threat, indicated that it would not change its current level, set at “AVERAGE(second level out of four possible).


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