Knifeman attacks policewomen while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’
TWO Belgian policewomen on guard outside a police station in the city of Charleroi were wounded in a machete attack yesterday by an assailant who shouted “Allahu Akbar”, police said.
The attacker was shot in the chest and the leg by a third officer, also a woman. He was taken to hospital where he later died, Belgian media reported. His name was not immediately known.
One of the policewomen suffered severe face wounds when the assailant slashed her several times.
She was being treated in hospital last night but her injuries were not de- scribed as life-threatening. Her was less seriously injured.
The attacker arrived at a checkpoint outside the police station just before 4pm local time and immediately took a machete out of his bag before lunging at the officer, and repeatedly hacking at her head, witnesses said.
The checkpoint was designed to foil direct attacks on the police station but the assault highlighted the vulnerability of officers responsible for checking visitors before allowing them in.
As the assailant lunged at the officers, he yelled “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic), police said.
Charles Michel, the country’s prime minister, told broadcaster RTL that the attack appeared to be a terrorist incident.
However, the case was being handled by criminal rather than counter- colleague terrorist prosecutors. A police spokesman said: “The investigation will have to show why the man staged the attack, and whether he maybe had mental problems.”
Police cordoned off the area around Boulevard Pierre Mainz, where the attack took place.
The attack came less than five months after coordinated bomb blasts in Brussels killed 32 people. Charleroi, 30 miles south of Brussels, was used as a base by some of the jihadists involved in the Brussels bombings and attacks in Paris last November that left 130 dead.
Mr Michel said: “My thoughts are with the victims, their families and the police. We are following the situation closely.”
Jan Jambon, the interior minister, said the “shameful” attack prompted a reassessment of the current threat level in Belgium.
A spate of attacks by Islamist extremists in western Europe — including the murder of an 85-year-old French priest and the Bastille Day massacre of 85 people in Nice — has intensified public anxiety about terrorism.
Governments face the increasingly challenging task of trying to protect citizens while preserving civil liberties and Western democratic freedoms.
French police have been allowed to take their guns home since a jihadist murdered a French couple, both police officers at their home in June.
France expelled a Malian suspected of “belonging to a pro-jihadist Islamist movement” and believed to pose a “serious threat” to national security, the interior minister has announced.
Vincent Gilles, vice president of SLFP, the biggest police trade union in Belgium, urged the Belgian government to “re-evaluate” the current level of threat in the country.
On Saturday, he told RTBF, the Francophone TV station, that police had been “expecting” an attack similar to the one in Charleroi after a raid against a jihadist cell in Verviers in eastern Belgium in January 2015. The authorities disrupted what is thought to have been a terrorist plot to attack Belgian police. A woman embraces a man outside the Cuba Libre bar in Rouen. An urgent investigation is under way amid questions about whether the music venue complied with fire regulations