Bomber is killed

Troops on high alert

BELGIAN counter-terrorism police are probing the identity of a suspected suicide bomber shot dead by troops guarding a Brussels railway station after he set off explosives that failed to injure anyone.

“We consider this a terrorist attack,” prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt said, declining to comment on witness accounts that the man had shouted Islamist slogans before detonating what witnesses said were one or two devices in luggage.

Although no one was hurt yesterday, billows of smoke pouring through Central Station and a shared awareness of Islamic State attacks in the city last year sent commuters racing for cover.

Police halted rail traffic, evacuated the site and cleared streets crowded with tourists and locals enjoying a hot summer’s evening in the historic city centre.

The Belgian capital, home to the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, has been on alert since a Brusselsbased IS cell organised the attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015.

Four months later, associates of those attackers killed 32 people in their home city.

Since then, attacks in France, Germany, Sweden and Britain have been carried out in the name of the Syria-based Islamist militant group, raising fears of more violence in a city where almost a quarter of the population of 1.2 million are Muslim.

Witnesses spoke of a man who shouted Islamist slogans, including “Allahu akbar” — God is greater — in Arabic, in an underground area of the station and seemed to set off one or two small blasts.

Security experts said it was similar to “lone-wolf” assaults carried out by radicalised individuals with limited access to weapons and training.

“Such isolated acts will continue in Brussels, in Paris and elsewhere. It’s inevitable,” security consultant Claude Moniquet, a former French agent, told broadcaster RTL.

Mr Moniquet said attacks in Europe could increase, although many would be by “amateurs” doing little harm.