Belgium on high alert after police kill two gunmen
BRUSSELS/VERVIERS: Belgian police were questioning 13 suspects yesterday detained during raids against an Islamist group they feared planned to attack police, while two other people were held in France, state prosecutors said.
A spokesman told a news conference there was still no apparent link to last week’s Islamist attacks in Paris and the identities of two gunmen killed during one of the raids on Thursday, in the eastern town of Verviers, had yet to be confirmed.
As well as guns, including four AK-47 assault rifles, and explosives, police unifor ms were found in the apartment at Verviers, spokesman Eric van der Sypt said, adding: “This group was on the point of carrying out terrorist attacks aiming to kill police officers in the streets and in police stations.”
Asked about a report of a plan to behead a policeman – an echo of Islamist violence elsewhere, including an attack on an off-duty soldier in London in 2013 – he declined to comment. He said there had been plans for attacks across Belgium.
He would not say where in France the two suspects there were detained, at the request of the Belgian authorities.
In separate operations that officials said were unrelated, German and French counterterrorism police made arrests.
Belgian security forces were on high alert, with extra armed security in evidence at some public buildings, notably police stations. Public broadcaster RTBF said officers were told not to be on the streets alone while in uniform.
Some Jewish schools in Belgium and the Netherlands were closed, reflecting the heighten- ing of an atmosphere of caution that has prevailed across Europe since Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris last week at a Jewish grocery and the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Belgian officials were expected to give more details of their investigation but have said they had no grounds to see a link to the French attacks for now. A separate inquiry is probing whether the Paris gunmen obtained arms in Belgium.
A third man in Verviers was under arrest and being questioned as were several people held in a number of raids in and around the Belgian capital, Brussels.
A former Belgian counterterrorism chief said the Charlie Hebdo attacks could have prompted Belgian police, who say they already had the suspects under surveillance, to bring forward the arrests.
“Paris may have speeded things up, in the sense that every country in Europe is on alert,” said Andre Jacob.
French police arrested a dozen people suspected of helping the Islamist gunmen in last week’s Paris killings. – Reuters