Investigators call Belgian city Daesh-style attack ‘terrorist murder’
Belgian investigators on Wednesday said a Daesh-style attack that killed three people in the eastern city of Liege was being treated as an act of terrorism.
The bloodshed shocked the eastern industrial city of Liege on Tuesday when the attacker armed with a knife repeatedly stabbed two policewomen before using their own firearms to kill them, a method investigators said was encouraged in online videos by the Daesh terrorist group, AFP reported.
Police were scrambling to unpick the motives of the attacker identified as Benjamin Herman, a 31-year-old drifter with a decade spent in and out of prison for acts of violence and petty crimes, who was out of jail on leave when he attacked.
“The facts are qualified as terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder,” prosecutors’ spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt told a news briefing in Brussels.
Van Der Sypt cautioned that the information dated “from late 2016, early 2017” and had not been confirmed since.
Prosecutors also underlined that the attacker’s method – attacking armed police officers and using their weapon against them – was a known “modus operandi” of the Daesh terror group, which claimed deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016.
But Interior Minister Jan Jambon urged caution over the extremist angle.
“There are signals that there was radicalization in the prison but did this radicalization lead to these actions? There too we can ask ourselves a lot of questions,” he told RTL radio.
Investigators on Tuesday found the hammer in Herman’s car and Jambon said police believed the Liege attacker carried out the killing just hours after getting temporary release from prison. Prosecutors confirmed Herman was being investigated over the case, saying it was a separate investigation.
As well as the two policewomen, the attacker also shot dead a 22-year-old student sitting in a parked car in central Liege. He then took a female cleaner hostage in the nearby Leonie de Waha school, a public institution with several hundred students aged from two to 18.
Belgium has been on alert since authorities in January 2015 smashed a terror cell in the town of Verviers near Liege that was planning an attack on police.