Belgium probes bomber shot dead by troops

Belgian counter-terrorism police are investigating the motives 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 militant slogans before detonating what witnesses said were one or two devices in luggage.

Broadcaster VTM quoted Interior Minister Jan Jambon as saying investigators had identified the man but were not releasing his name. A larger bomb failed to go off, VTM said.

Several media outlets ran unsourced reports saying the dead man was 37 and came from Molenbeek, the inner city borough with a big Moroccan population which was home to some of the figures in Islamic State attacks on Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016.

Police were searching homes in the neighbourhood, media said.

Although no one was hurt, billows of smoke pouring through Central Station and memories of Islamic State attacks in the city last year, and more recently in Britain, France and elsewhere, sent evening commuters racing for cover.

Police halted rail traffic, evacuated the site and cleared streets crowded with tourists and residents enjoying a hot summer’s evening in the historic city centre between the station and nearby Grand Place, Brussels’ landmark Renaissance town square.

The Belgian capital, home to the headquarters of Nato and the European Union, has been on high alert since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell organised an attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015. Associates of those attackers killed 32 people in their home city four months later.

Since then, attacks in France, but also in Germany, Sweden and, most recently, in Britain, have been carried out in the name of the Syriabased extremist militant group by other young men, many of them locals, raising fears of more violence in a city where almost a quarter of the population of 1.2 million are Muslim. — Reuters