by Philip Blenkinsop and Marine Strauss
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The perpetrator of the murder of two Swedish football fans on Monday evening in Brussels was fatally shot by police during his arrest in a café on Tuesday morning, a few hours after an attack which, according to the Prime Minister Swedish, shows that Europe must further strengthen its security.
The man, a 45-year-old Tunisian who identified himself as a member of the Islamic State (IS) group and claimed responsibility for the attack in a video posted online, also injured one person, a third Swedish national.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel.
“This is the time to strengthen security, we cannot be naive,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at a news conference in Stockholm, calling for stricter border controls in Europe.
“These terrorists want to scare us into obedience and silence. That will not happen,” he added.
This shooting comes against a backdrop of growing security concerns in certain European countries over the fallout from the Middle East conflict. In France, up to 7,000 soldiers will be mobilized following the assassination of Dominique Bernard, a teacher stabbed to death on Friday in Arras (Pas-de-Calais).
A Belgian federal prosecutor initially said there was no evidence that the attack had a link to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, but this is no longer ruled out, RTBF reported.
The Belgian government lowered its alert level to 3 in the Brussels region after raising it to the maximum when the suspect fled.
Sweden, for its part, raised its terrorist alert level last August after several Koran burnings which aroused indignation in Muslim countries, urging the Nordic countries to put an end to these events.
In videos of the attack posted on social networks, we can see a man, wearing an orange vest and traveling on a scooter, opening fire at an intersection, with first two shots, then three more, before running towards a building and shoot twice more.
The victims are two men, one aged around 70 from the Stockholm area, and a second aged around 60 who lived abroad, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said, adding that the injured man, also in his 70s, was still in hospital. They came to watch a football match between Belgium and Sweden.
EUROPE “SHUT UP”
The Brussels attack came just days after a teacher was fatally stabbed in northern France in an attack that President Emmanuel Macron condemned as the “barbarity of Islamist terrorism.”
While traveling in Albania, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that Brussels had once again been hit by an “Islamist terrorist attack”. “Our Europe is shaken up,” he added during a speech.
The French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced Tuesday morning on RTL a strengthening of the police presence at the Belgian border as well as in Lille, which is to host in the evening a friendly football match between France and the Scotland.
The bomber had been refused an asylum request in 2020, was living in the country illegally and was known to Belgian police for migrant smuggling, Belgian authorities said.
According to the Ansa agency, he arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011 – which was confirmed by a government source in Rome -, he had stayed in Italy, had gone to Sweden from where he was allegedly expelled , had returned to the Peninsula where he was identified by the police in Bologna in 2016 as a suspect of radicalization and placed under surveillance. He then went to Belgium.
Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne said police were alerted in 2016 by a foreign intelligence service to his “radicalized profile”, but added that Belgian services had not picked up any clues concrete evidence of this radicalization and had not placed him under surveillance.
The shooter fled after the shooting, as the Euro 2024 qualifying match between Belgium and Sweden was about to begin. The match was interrupted at half-time.
The European Commission, headquartered in Brussels, has asked its staff to work from home. Some schools have been closed.
Belgium has been the target of several Islamist attacks in recent years, the deadliest being the 2016 attack on Brussels airport and the city’s metro, which left 32 dead.
(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop, Bart Meijer, Benoit van Overstraeten, Jan Strupczewski, Tassilo Hummel, Zhifan Liu, Marine Strauss, Louise Breusch Rasmussen, Niklas Pollard and Anna Ringstrom; writing by Jean Terzian, Blandine Hénault, Zhifan Liu and Kate Entringer, editing by Bertrand Boucey and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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