3 held in Brussels over Paris attacks
BRUSSELS – Belgian police arrested three people on Saturday in raids in a poor, immigrant quarter of Brussels as they pursued emerging links between the Paris attacks and an Islamist bastion in France’s northern neighbor.
Prime Minister Charles Michel said at least one of those held from the inner Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek was believed to have spent the previous evening in Paris,
where two cars registered in Belgium were impounded close to scenes of some of the violence, including the Bataclan music hall.
“Police operations will go on,” Michel told RTL television as local media reported continued security activity overnight in Molenbeek, west of the city center, which is home to many Muslims, notably families originally from Morocco and Turkey.
On Friday night, several sites around Paris were targeted in a coordinated assault by gunmen and bombers in what the Paris public prosecutor said killed at least 129 people and wounded more than 350, of whom nearly 100 remain in critical condition.
Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attacks.
A French prosecutor said a car hired in Belgium was linked to the attacks and that a Frenchman living in Brussels rented it and was later stopped early on Saturday at the Belgian border.
Proportional to its 11 million population, of whom half a million are Muslim, Belgium has been the European country which has contributed the most foreign fighters to the civil war in Syria — over 300 by official estimates a year ago — and it has figured in many Islamist attacks and plots across the continent.
Molenbeek has been connected with two attacks in France this year alone. Security officials have said the Islamist who killed people at a Paris kosher grocery in January at the time of the attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo acquired weapons in the district. So too did the man overpowered in August on a Thalys high-speed train from Brussels to Paris before he killed anyone.
An alleged plot to attack Belgian police stations in January, which was broken up by raids in which two men were killed in the eastern town of Verviers, had connections to Molenbeek. And a Frenchman accused of shooting dead four people last year at the Jewish Museum in the Belgian capital also spent time in the area.
Interior Minister Jan Jambon told Belgian television he believed Brussels and Molenbeek in particular was a problem and that he would personally take charge of sorting out issues in a neighborhood, which conservative critics view as an example of failed left-wing experiments in mass immigration.
The district’s mayor said many radicals in Molenbeek were just passing through, taking advantage of the anonymity afforded by areas of the borough almost entirely populated by Muslims.
The Belgian prosecutors would not say whether any of those arrested on Saturday were previously known to authorities.
At least three of those killed in the Paris attacks were Belgian and the country launched its own antiterrorist investigation into the events as a result. Michel said it would work in close cooperation with the French inquiries.
After a meeting of the national security Cabinet, the government raised the level of alert across the country for large events, giving officials the ability to call in troops.
Michel urged Belgians not to travel to Paris unless absolutely necessary.
In coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, US justice department attorneys are working with French authorities to obtain further information that may be relevant to the Paris attacks, a justice department official said on Saturday.
Department officials have also been in touch with the French Ministries of Interior and Justice to offer our fullest cooperation, the official said.
“We also understand that several US citizens were injured and at least one was killed in the attack. We are taking all appropriate steps in this regard, and our Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terrorism is supporting the US government’s assistance to the victims and their families through the State Department and FBI,” the official said in a statement from the department.
IS attackers
Three teams of Islamic State attackers acting in unison carried out the terrorist assault in Paris on Friday night, officials said Saturday, including one assailant who may have traveled to Europe on a Syrian passport along with the flow of migrants.
“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande of France told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”
As the death toll rose to 129 — with 352 others wounded, 99 of them critically — a basic timeline of the attacks came into view.
The Paris prosecutor François Molins said the attackers were all armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one terrorist detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan.