Tag: belgium
Belgian Police Break Up Street Protests As Attack Investigation Widens

Belgian Police Break Up Street Protests As Attack Investigation Widens

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian police briefly used water cannon to control several hundred rowdy protesters in central Brussels on Sunday after they ignored an official call for marches to be postponed following Tuesday’s bombings.

Amid fears of further attacks, officials wanted to give police the scope to focus on investigations which have widened to other countries, leading to the arrest of an Algerian in Italy and intelligence cooperation with Germany. Police carried out 13 new raids in Belgium itself.

Hundreds nevertheless gathered at the Bourse to express solidarity with the victims of the suicide bomb attacks at Brussels airport and on a rush-hour metro train. Thirty one people were killed, including three attackers, and hundreds more injured. Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

Most of the protests were peaceful but white-helmeted riot police used the water cannon against a group of protesters, many of whom local media described as right-wing nationalists, who burst onto the square chanting and carrying banners denouncing Islamic State.

“It is highly inappropriate that protesters have disrupted the peaceful reflection at the Bourse (stock exchange). I strongly condemn these disturbances,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said according to Belga news agency.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur said the group were “scoundrels”.

In and around Brussels and Antwerp, police carried out 13 new raids in connection with the attacks, with nine people questioned and five later released, the prosecutor’s office said.

With links to the Paris attacks in November becoming clearer, and amid criticism that Europe has not done enough to share intelligence about suspected Islamist militants, cooperation appeared to be deepening.

Belgian press agency Belga said on Sunday prosecutors had charged a man in connection with a raid in Paris on Thursday that authorities say foiled an apparent attack plot.

Belga named him as Abderamane A. who prosecutors had said on Saturday was being held after being shot in a raid in the Brussels district of Schaerbeek.

After a series of raids in Belgium and Germany, Italian police also arrested Algerian Djamal Eddine Ouali who is suspected of making documents for militants linked to the bombings, Italian media said on Saturday.

His name was found in documents in a raid on an apartment near Brussels last October, including some with photos of militants involved in the attacks in Paris and in Brussels and the aliases they used.

 

Web Of Links

As the web of links between the suspects and attacks emerges, German lawmakers said Europe urgently needed to improve the way its security agencies shared information.

But Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office was among the European security agencies still hunting for at least eight mostly French or Belgian suspects, Die Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported. They are thought to be on the run in Syria or Europe.

Belgian prosecutors also charged three men on Saturday including Faycal C., whom Belgian media identified as Faycal Cheffou and said he was “the man in the hat”, as he has become known, in last Tuesday’s airport CCTV footage that showed three men pushing baggage trolleys.

However, investigators have not confirmed that Cheffou is that man, a person close to the investigation told Reuters.

A video posted on social media outlets used by Islamic State on Saturday showed a Belgian militant in the group’s de facto capital Raqqa, Syria, taunting his home country in Flemish.

“You learned nothing from the lessons of Paris, because you continued fighting Islam and the Muslims. For this I want to tell you that the attack in Brussels is reaping what you had sown with your own hands,” Hicham Chaib, whose nom de guerre was given as Abu Hanifa al-Beljiki, said.

“Just as you bomb the Muslims with your F-16s, we will fight your people.”

The authenticity of the video could not immediately be verified by Reuters.

Officials said 24 victims from nine different nationalities had been identified so far from the attacks in Brussels, where the European Union and NATO have their headquarters. Fourteen were identified at the airport and 10 on the metro. A further four people remain unidentified.

In addition, 340 people were wounded, according to the latest official toll on Saturday, of whom 101 are still in hospital, 62 of them in intensive care, many with severe burns.

Away from the protests on the Bourse square, Brussels was largely quiet on Sunday, with many celebrating Easter but Monseigneur Jozef De Kesel, archbishop of Brussels, told Reuters it would be difficult to celebrate as usual.

“The foundations of our society, freedom, respect for others, have been hit, attacked,” he said.

 

(Additional reporting by Hortense de Roffignac and Herve Veloes in Brussels and Caroline Copley in Berlin; Writing by Anna Willard; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Photo: Right-wing demonstrators protest against the wave of terrorism in front of the old stock exchange in Brussels, Belgium. March 27. 2016.   REUTERS/Yves Herman

France Says It Foils Advanced Attack Plot: Minister

France Says It Foils Advanced Attack Plot: Minister

PARIS (Reuters) – A French national suspected of belonging to a militant network planning an attack in France was arrested on Thursday morning, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

The arrest helped “foil a plot in France that was at an advanced stage,” Cazeneuve said on Thursday night in a televised address from his ministry.

“The individual questioned, a French national, is suspected of high-level involvement in this plan. He was part of a terrorist network that planned to strike France,” Cazeneuve said.

Following the arrest by the French counterterrorism service, DGSI, the agency carried out a raid on Thursday night at an apartment building in Argenteuil, a suburb in northern Paris, he said.

“At this stage, there is no tangible evidence that links this plot to the attacks in Paris and Brussels,” said Cazeneuve, who was in the Belgian capital earlier on Thursday.

French radio station France Info reported that the man had been sentenced in Belgium for belonging to a jihadist network. French TV station ITele reported that explosives had been found in the man’s house.

The arrest came two days after suicide bombers hit the Brussels airport and a metro train, killing at least 31 people and wounding some 270 in the worst such attack in Belgian history.

In November, 130 people were killed in Paris in coordinated attacks on cafes, a sports stadium and a concert hall. The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for both the Paris and Brussels attacks.

 

(Reporting by Miriam Rivet, Geert De Clercq and John Irish; Editing by Sandra Maler and Peter Cooney)

Photo: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve talks to journalists after a meeting about blasts in Brussels at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentese

‘Rambo’ Appeal, Not The Mosque, Lures Brussels Youths To IS

‘Rambo’ Appeal, Not The Mosque, Lures Brussels Youths To IS

By Alissa de Carbonnel

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Khalid Ben Larbi lived a hedonistic lifestyle similar to other European youths and rarely went to the mosque in Molenbeek, the mainly Muslim Moroccan immigrant area where he and three of the suspected Paris attackers grew up in Brussels.

It was the same inner-city disenchantment that leads other youths to drugs and crime, not the preachings of a radical imam, that neighbors, local social workers and imams say changed Ben Larbi from raucous adolescent to Islamic State foot soldier, drawn by the promise of adventure and glory.

The families in Molenbeek and other areas are often shocked to discover their children have been recruited by a mix of back street preachers, social media and a growing network of hometown jihadists spreading tales of derring-do in Syria.

Ben Larbi was a “regular guy”, liked the movies, was comfortably off. Then one day last year, he disappeared to fight in Syria before returning to Belgium in January when the 23-year-old was killed in a police raid, Kalashnikov in hand.

“His mother was totally shocked. Even now, months later, she doesn’t go out,” a local woman who knows the family told Reuters as police searched Brussels for Salah Abdeslam, a key suspect in the Nov. 13 IS attacks in Paris. “He said he was going to see friends. Next thing they knew, he was calling from Syria.”

Ben Larbi’s family could not be contacted for comment.

He joined up in Syria with another Molenbeek man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected planner of the Paris attacks who was killed by French police last week.

They posted Internet videos, some gory, some jokey. Abaaoud, 28, who shocked his own family by heading to Syria in 2013 according to interviews with his family in Belgian media, dubbed himself the “tourist terrorist”. Officials believe he has lured other Molenbeek men into violence.

“The Syrian problem has broken us,” said Jamal Habbachich, who heads a council of 22 Molenbeek mosques. “Families come to us devastated.”

Having paid little attention to Muslim practices in the past, families often only realize their sons have changed when they take their relatives to task for lax observance, says Olivier Vanderhaegen, who works for a new service set up by Molenbeek borough this year to combat youth radicalization.

“That is clearly a final phase of radicalization; and it’s usually only then that families realize there is a problem; and often almost too late,” he said at his office near Abdeslam’s home.

IDENTITY CRISIS

With Brussels locked down for three days for fear Salah Abdeslam or others could mount new, Paris-style attacks, their story has put the spotlight on Molenbeek.

On the wrong side of the city’s canal, the borough is afflicted by overcrowding and high youth unemployment, the same problems that are blamed for delinquency and ghettoization in other inner city communities.

That is combined with a feeling among some of Moroccan descent that they belong neither in Morocco or Belgium.

“The radicalization we see is essentially an identity crisis,” said Vanderhaegen.

Abdeslam, 26, who ran a local bar in trouble with the drug squad, knew Abaaoud in prison, security officials say. Both men did time for petty larceny four or five years ago. Noone thought he cared about religion.

But, his elder brother Mohamed told Belgian television on Sunday, he began to notice earlier this year that Salah and another brother, Brahim, started to pray and stopped drinking alcohol at social gatherings.

Brahim, who owned the bar Salah ran, blew himself up outside the Comptoir Voltaire cafe in Paris.

The brothers, like most of their neighbors, are the children and grandchildren of Moroccan migrants invited en masse by Belgium in the 1960s to plug labor shortages.

“My grandfather worked for 25 years in the coal mines, my father died there, and people still look at me sideways,” said Fatima, 42, outside a mosque tucked away on the first floor of a residential building in Molenbeek, where dozens of young men filed in for Friday prayers last week.

SAVVY RECRUITERS

As a child, Salah visited the Attadamoun Mosque in Molenbeek but then stopped going, Habbachich said. He said some imams are too steeped in tradition to talk over the everyday challenges the youths face. Only one in two of the borough’s imams even speak French, he said.

“So they look elsewhere,” Vanderhaegen said, lured by recruiters who speak the “language of the street” such as sharia4belgium, a social media savvy organization whose leader and dozens of members were convicted early this year in the Flemish city of Antwerp of enticing dozens to fight in Syria.

Molenbeek Mayor Francoise Schepmans, who described her borough as a “breeding ground for radical violence”, admitted authorities have yet to come to grips with the problem.

Since 2014, four officers are on the watch for extremism among the 220,000 inhabitants of the police district Molenbeek is part of. “It’s not enough,” Schepmans said.

With at least 350 people from Belgium having gone to Syria to fight – the highest per capita number in Europe – and becoming heroes to others, many feel more needs to be done.

“Sharia4belgium walked our streets for years before the authorities intervened,” said Habbachich.

Although the number of new departures has more than halved from 10-12 per month in 2012-2013 to about 5 per month this summer, counter-terrorism expert Rik Coolsaet said, today’s new generation of would-be IS fighters are a less idealistic, more “hard-core” group of “sadism, adventure, thrill seekers”.

“In this no-future atmosphere, it is a new outlet for deviant behavior,” he said. “One which gives them some kind of belonging.”

In a correctional home for minors in Brussels, where Mohamed Azaitraoui works as a Muslim counselor, four out of 80 of his charges have been picked up by the security services on suspicion of having IS ties.

He recently spent months counseling a 17-year-old, whom he believes dealt directly online with a Syrian recruiter.

Azaitraoui’s professional experience has made him particularly watchful even of his own teenage children.

“Better not to wake up one day and find they’ve gone,” he said. “Teens think they are Rambos: invincible. They are told they’ll be offered salvation in Syria. It’s a delectable myth.”

(Editing by Anna Willard)

Belgium Uncovers Plot To Kill Police As Terror Arrests Sweep Europe

Belgium Uncovers Plot To Kill Police As Terror Arrests Sweep Europe

Brussels (AFP) – Belgian police raided an Islamist cell planning attacks against police on Friday as dozens of people were arrested in sweeps across Europe, keeping the continent on alert one week after the Paris attacks.

Two suspected jihadists were shot dead in a police raid in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers on Thursday night and prosecutors said 13 suspects had been detained across Belgium, with two more held in France.

French police separately detained 12 people in the suburbs of Paris in connection with last week’s attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, a Jewish supermarket and a policewoman, in which 17 people were killed.

Hundreds of German police meanwhile raided alleged Islamist sites in Berlin, arresting two men suspected of being part of a group planning to carry out an attack in Syria.

The raids highlighted fears about young Europeans travelling to fight with the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda-linked groups in the Middle East before returning to carry out attacks on western targets.

“The group was on the verge of carrying out terrorist attacks to kill police officers in public roads and in police stations,” Belgian federal prosecutors’ spokesman Eric Van der Sijpt told a news conference about the raids overnight.

Police found Kalashnikov assault rifles, explosives, ammunition and communications equipment, along with police uniforms that could have been used for the terror plot, he said.

Members of the group had recently returned from Syria, prosecutors said, but they said there still appeared to be no direct link to the Paris attacks.

Prime Minister Charles Michel raised Belgium’s terror alert to its second highest level after the raids. The European Commission stepped up security at its headquarters in Brussels as a “precaution”, a spokeswoman said.

Jewish schools in Brussels and the port city of Antwerp closed Friday.

The unrest across Europe has fueled fears of tensions between communities, but in Verviers, a faded industrial town near the German border, residents said they would stay united.

“The Muslim community had the strongest reaction, one that says that none of this should exacerbate the delicate balance that makes this town stand on its feet,” mayor Marc Elsen said.

Belgium has one of the largest number of extremists who have returned from Syria relative to its population, with a large Muslim community that suffers from high unemployment and disenfranchisement.

With France still reeling from the attacks which targeted its cherished traditions of free speech, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid wreaths on Friday at both Charlie Hebdo offices and the Jewish supermarket during a visit to Paris.

It follows criticism of the U.S. for not sending a top representative to a march in Paris on Sunday, which drew 1.5 million people and dozens of world leaders in the wake of the attacks.

The magazine inflamed Muslims in many countries by printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The funeral of Stephane Charbonnier, alias Charb, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, was also due to take place on Friday.

The nine men and three women arrested in France overnight were to be questioned about “possible logistic support” they may have given to the gunmen — Islamist brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly — in particular weapons and vehicles, the source said.

In Germany an alleged leader of a group planning to carry out an attack in Syria and the man in charge of financing were arrested in raids on suspected Islamist sites in and around Berlin by more than 200 police officers, officials said.

They were suspected of leading an Islamist group of “Turkish and Russian nationals from (the Caucasus regions’ of) Chechnya and Dagestan.”

International anger over Charlie Hebdo’s printing of a new image of Mohammed in its sold-out comeback issue this week continued to rage, with protesters clashing with police outside the French consulate the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

AFP photographer Asif Hassan was shot while covering the demo but appeared to be out of danger following surgery.

AFP Photo/John Thys