A machete-wielding man shouting Allahu Akbar (“God is great”) on Saturday wounded two policewomen in southern Belgium before being shot dead, in what appeared to be the latest in a string of extremist attacks in Europe.
The attack outside the main police station in the city of Charleroi, about 60km south of Brussels, left one of the policewomen with “deep wounds to the face,” while the other was slightly injured, Belga news agency said.
Charleroi police said the attacker was shot and killed, while the two victims were out of danger.
Photo: EPA
The assailant “hasn’t been identified yet,” Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel told TV station RTL-TVI, “but it seems once more to be an attack with a terrorist connotation.”
Belgium has been on high alert since suicide bombers struck Brussels Airport and a subway station near the EU’s institutions on March 22, killing 32 people.
The attacks were claimed by the Islamic State group, which controls large areas of territory in Iraq and Syria and has claimed numerous terror attacks in Europe in the past year.
Charleroi police spokesman David Quinaux told RTL-TVI that the assailant arrived outside the police station at about 4pm.
“He immediately took a machete out of the sports bag he was carrying and violently struck at the faces of the two policewomen who were on guard duty, shouting Allahu akbar,” Quinaux said.
A third policewoman shot the assailant, who later died in a hospital.
Belgian Federal Minister of the Interior Jan Jambon condemned a “disgusting act.”
The country’s terror threat level was assessed in the light of the attack, but was left “unchanged for the time being,” Jambon said on Twitter.
It currently stands at level three, meaning a “possible or probable” threat, on a scale of four.
Belgian police have carried out dozens of anti-terror raids since attacks in Paris in November last year, planned in Belgium and involving Belgian extremists, which left 130 people dead.
Security was ratcheted up further for Belgium’s July 21 national day celebrations after a truck attack that killed 85 people in the French city of Nice on July 14, Bastille Day.
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