Belgian inmate on leave dies after 3 people slain
BRUSSELS — A prison inmate on a 48-hour leave fatally shot two police officers and a civilian, and then took a woman hostage at a school in the eastern city of Liege on Tuesday, before being killed by police, officials said. No students were injured.
“The goal of the attacker was to target the police,” Liege Police Chief Christian Beaupere said. The assailant, a Belgian, had a long criminal record, and prosecutors said they were investigating the attack as a terrorism episode.
Prosecutors said the assailant attacked two female police officers from behind with a knife about 10:30 a.m., stabbed them several times in the back and took their weapons, before using the weapons to fatally shoot the officers. The slain officers were 45 years old and 53 years old, the latter the mother of twins, Beaupere said.
The attacker also fatally shot a 22-year-old man sitting in a parked car in central Liege, then ran away. He then took a female cleaner hostage in the nearby Atheneum Leonie de Waha school, a public institution with several hundred students ages 3-18.
The police moved in, prompting the gunman to open fire, wounding four police officers. One suffered a severed femoral artery and was in critical condition. The gunman was then shot and killed, officials said. The cleaner was not injured. Students were taken to a nearby park and another public school building. The area around the school was sealed off for hours.
The suspect was identified by the state broadcaster RTBF as Benjamin Herman, a Belgian born in 1982 who had a criminal record that included theft, assault and drug offenses.
A senior counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, also identified Herman as the suspect.
Justice Minister Koen Geens told reporters that the assailant had served a series of prison sentences since 2003 and had been released Monday for a 48-hour leave. It was the 14th time he had been granted leave.
Geens said the leaves were intended to prepare the man for his planned release from prison in 2020.
Asked if there were signs that the man was radicalized in prison, Geens said it was “not a clear-cut case.”
The man had been held at the Marche-en-Famenne federal prison, which like others in Belgium contends with crowding and the radicalization of inmates, officials said. A 2018 report by Amnesty International found that Belgian prisons are crowded and dilapidated, and basic services are insufficient.
Liege, a city of about 200,000 people, was the site of a similar attack in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded many more before shooting himself.
Belgium is still on alert after attacks by a Belgian-based cell of the Islamic State militant group killed scores of people in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in 2016.
The number of police officers and armed soldiers patrolling the streets of major cities has crept up in Belgium and several other European countries, and officers have been killed or wounded on such patrols in several attacks over the past three years.
The federal prosecutor’s office, which is in charge of terrorism-related investigations, is looking into Tuesday’s attack. A spokesman for the office, Eric Van der Sijpt, said: “There are reasons to think that this could be a terror attack.”
Still, Belgium’s crisis center said it saw no reason to raise the country’s terror threat alert for now.
Belgium’s King Philippe, Prime Minister Charles Michel and the country’s justice and interior ministers traveled to Liege to confer with local officials.
“I want to offer my government’s support for the victims, for the victims’ families,” Michel said.