‘Four planned to strike crowd’
Dutch court agrees to return terror suspect to France
BRUSSELS, May 26, (Agencies): State-run Belgian broadcaster RTBF said Thursday four suspected extremists detained by police were collecting money to buy arms and explosives and developing plans to strike at a crowded target like Antwerp’s main train station.
Belgian prosecutors have said all four suspects have been charged with participating in the activities of a terrorist group, but declined to give additional details.
RTBF, citing “official sources,” said the suspects were exchanging encrypted messages with other Belgians in Syria including Hicham Chaib, a leader of the Islamic State extremist group in its Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
The broadcaster says it was those communications that worried Belgian authorities, who detained the suspects Wednesday along with a number of minors following police searches in the Antwerp area.
RTBF said one suspect and one minor were still being held Thursday.
In a statement, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office said the suspects don’t appear to have links to the suicide bombers who struck the Brussels airport and subway March 22, killing 32 victims. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the carnage, as well as for the Nov 13 attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.
Belgium, home to a large minority population of North African origin, has been one of Europe’s most fertile recruiting grounds for Islamic State. Prosecutors said some of those detained Wednesday planned to go to Syria or Libya and join the extremist group. All of the suspects are believed to have wanted to recruit people to go to those conflict zones, and initial indications are they were plotting attacks in Belgium as well, prosecutors said.
RTBF said the suspects’ goal was to “strike at a crowd,” and that the train station in the port city of Antwerp, one of Belgium’s busiest, was a potential target. The broadcaster said the investigation that led to Wednesday’s searches and detentions started in November after the Paris attacks.
Belgian newspaper Nieuwsblad said the group members were in direct contact with a prominent Belgian militant in Islamic State’s de facto capital Raqqa in Syria.
Dutch judges agreed Thursday to send a wanted Frenchman back to his home country where he faces accusations of involvement in a foiled terror attack.
Police raided an apartment in Rotterdam in late March at France’s request where they arrested Anis Bahri, and found about 45 kilos (almost 100 pounds) of ammunition.
Bahri is suspected of planning to carry out an attack in France for the Islamic State group along with Reda Kriket, another suspect detained near Paris a few days before him.
“The court doesn’t see any reason to refuse handing you back (to French authorities) and so approves the request,” judge Hans Kijlstra told the public court hearing in Amsterdam.
Bahri, 32, had sought to fight his return to France, saying he feared he would be sentenced to life imprisonment and mistreated in a French jail.
But the court rejected his pleas, and stressed that no proceedings were being brought against him in the Netherlands.
“Based on the information available to us about detention conditions in France, we are unable to conclude that there’s a real danger of such treatment,” judge Kijlstra said in his verdict.
French prosecutors will use leaked Islamic State documents to help identify seven suspected jihadists going on trial next week, including the brother of a Paris attacker, sources close to the investigation said Wednesday.
The seven men from Strasbourg in eastern France, aged between 24 and 26, are accused of travelling to join the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria in late 2013 and returning several months later.
Among the men, who were arrested in May 2014, is Karim MohamedAggad, brother of Foued MohamedAggad who was part of the three-man group that attacked the Bataclan concert hall on the night of the Paris attacks in November.
The Paris prosecutor’s office intends to use the documents, acquired by British TV station Sky News in March, during the trial that starts on Monday, but the move has been criticised by the defence lawyers.
“Five days from the trial, this is an unusual step,” said one of the defence lawyers, Eric Plouvier, saying there were doubts over the authenticity of the IS documents.
“Either these elements should be removed, or there should be a report to study (their authenticity),” he said.
The documents contain some 22,000 names of individuals linked to IS in 2013 and early 2014, the investigation source said.
An estimated 173 of those names are French citizens or residents of France, including several who have died in Syria and Iraq and two more of the Paris attackers — Samy Amimour and Omar Ismail Mostefai.
A man with extremist links was briefly holed up inside a Paris home near a march expected to draw thousands of labor protesters.
Paris police say a doctor who arrived at the home to take the man to a psychiatric hospital sounded the alarm Thursday. French media said the man, whose identity has not been released, is believed to have a knife and a tear gas bomb. Police say they have overpowered him but there was no sign yet of police and the man leaving the building.
The standoff took place about a block from the Bastille, where a labor march was to start within an hour.
Fears of attacks by Islamic extremists have left France on edge.
A Milan court on Wednesday sentenced a Pakistani and a Tunisian to six years in prison for threatening terror attacks in Italy via social media.
Tunisian Lassad Briki, 35, and Pakistan national Muhammad Baqas, 27, will be deported after serving their sentences, the judge said after agreeing to the maximum sanction requested by prosecutors.
The two men were arrested in July 2015 in Brescia in northern Italy on suspicion of setting up a Twitter account from which they posted messages threatening to attack iconic Italian monuments like Milan’s Duomo and the Colosseum in Rome.
The threats were accompanied by photos of the monuments and written in Italian, French and Arabic.