Brussels: Police have detained eight people during investigations into an alleged jihadist plot to commit “terrorist attacks” in Belgium, authorities said Tuesday.
Raids were conducted late Monday on homes in the capital Brussels, the port city of Antwerp and the border town of Eupen, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
A judicial source told AFP those arrested were “very young radicalised people” suspected of belonging to a jihadist movement.
The prosecutor’s statement cited two inquiries, one led by federal police in Brussels and the other by an investigating magistrate in Antwerp.
Both led to house raids on Monday, and the statement said: “There are links between the two files, but further research will have to show to what extent the two groups were intertwined.”
The Antwerp inquiry led to five arrests, including one in Eupen, near the German border, and the Brussels probe led to three arrests.
The statement said at least five of those detained were suspected of planning to “commit a terrorist attack in Belgium”.
In both cases, the suspects have been detained but not yet charged.
Sources spoke of more than one possible attack, but the statement said the eventual target or targets had not yet been determined.
The parallel investigations triggered a raid in Molenbeek, an inner-city Brussels district with a large North African population that has been the focus of some previous terror probes.
The investigations in Antwerp and Brussels initially focused on “two young adults suspected of violent radicalism”, state broadcaster RTBF reported.
– ‘Rise in radicalisation’ – Between 2016 and 2018, Belgium faced a wave of deadly jihadist attacks.
The country’s biggest ever criminal trial of nine suspects accused of taking part in the March 2016 suicide bombings that killed 32 people is underway in Brussels.
These bombings were carried out by the same jihadist cell that killed 130 people during the November 2015 attacks in Paris, helping to prepare the attacks from hideouts in Belgium.
Monday’s arrests mark the first such terror inquiry to be made public in Belgium since November when a Brussels man was charged with terrorism offences after stabbing a police officer to death.
Officials had however warned of the continued danger.
The threat of terrorism “still remains, with planned attacks that are regularly prevented by our services”, Belgian federal police chief, Eric Snoeck, told RTBF on March 24.
In its latest annual report published in January, Belgium’s domestic intelligence service noted “a worrying rise in the number of increasingly young people falling into extremist radicalisation” of a religious and politically extreme nature.
The OCAM national threat analysis centre said on Tuesday that Belgium’s terror alert level would remain at “medium”, or a level of two out of a maximum of four.
Raids were conducted late Monday on homes in the capital Brussels, the port city of Antwerp and the border town of Eupen, the federal prosecutor’s office said.
A judicial source told AFP those arrested were “very young radicalised people” suspected of belonging to a jihadist movement.
The prosecutor’s statement cited two inquiries, one led by federal police in Brussels and the other by an investigating magistrate in Antwerp.
Both led to house raids on Monday, and the statement said: “There are links between the two files, but further research will have to show to what extent the two groups were intertwined.”
The Antwerp inquiry led to five arrests, including one in Eupen, near the German border, and the Brussels probe led to three arrests.
The statement said at least five of those detained were suspected of planning to “commit a terrorist attack in Belgium”.
In both cases, the suspects have been detained but not yet charged.
Sources spoke of more than one possible attack, but the statement said the eventual target or targets had not yet been determined.
The parallel investigations triggered a raid in Molenbeek, an inner-city Brussels district with a large North African population that has been the focus of some previous terror probes.
The investigations in Antwerp and Brussels initially focused on “two young adults suspected of violent radicalism”, state broadcaster RTBF reported.
– ‘Rise in radicalisation’ – Between 2016 and 2018, Belgium faced a wave of deadly jihadist attacks.
The country’s biggest ever criminal trial of nine suspects accused of taking part in the March 2016 suicide bombings that killed 32 people is underway in Brussels.
These bombings were carried out by the same jihadist cell that killed 130 people during the November 2015 attacks in Paris, helping to prepare the attacks from hideouts in Belgium.
Monday’s arrests mark the first such terror inquiry to be made public in Belgium since November when a Brussels man was charged with terrorism offences after stabbing a police officer to death.
Officials had however warned of the continued danger.
The threat of terrorism “still remains, with planned attacks that are regularly prevented by our services”, Belgian federal police chief, Eric Snoeck, told RTBF on March 24.
In its latest annual report published in January, Belgium’s domestic intelligence service noted “a worrying rise in the number of increasingly young people falling into extremist radicalisation” of a religious and politically extreme nature.
The OCAM national threat analysis centre said on Tuesday that Belgium’s terror alert level would remain at “medium”, or a level of two out of a maximum of four.