Belgian security forces have identified the man who set off an explosion at one of Brussels’ busiest train stations before he was shot and killed, in the latest attack to hit Europe, authorities said yesterday.
Belgian Minister of the Interior Jan Jambon said the attack on Tuesday evening could have been much worse because the “big explosion did not happen,” adding more details about the device would be released.
Witnesses said the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”) before setting off the blast, which triggered a small, but intense fireball in Central Station’s underground hall.
Photo: AP / Remy Bonnaffe
“The terrorist’s identity is known. We have been able to identify him,” Jambon told RTBF radio and television without giving further details.
Jambon said that police had carried out searches once the attacker’s identity was known.
There were no other casualties apart from the suspect, who was confirmed dead by prosecutors hours after the attack.
Crying rail passengers fled the station after the explosion, with memories still fresh of last year’s metro and airport suicide attacks in the city which hosts the EU and NATO headquarters.
The busy Central Station in the heart of Brussels, which sits just beside the Grand Place, one of the city’s main tourist attractions, reopened at about 8am yesterday, railway authorities said.
“This is considered as a terrorist attack,” federal prosecutors’ office spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt said at a news conference outside the station late on Tuesday.
The blast came a day after a man mowed down Muslims near a mosque in London and a suspected militant on a terror watchlist rammed a car laden with weapons into a police vehicle in Paris.
Brussels has been on high alert since suicide bombers struck Zavantem Airport and the Maalbeek metro station near the EU quarter in March last year, killing 32 people and injuring hundreds.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks, which were carried out by the same Brussels-based cell behind the November 2015 suicide bombings and shootings in Paris that left 130 dead.
Initial reports said the blast at Central Station could have come from an explosive belt, but subsequent accounts suggested it may have been a suitcase on a trolley.
Van der Sypt said that at about 6:30pm there was a “small explosion.”
“The suspect has been neutralized by the military that were present at the scene immediately after the explosion,” he said.
The incident happened well after rush hour, but hundreds of passengers were still evacuated from one of Belgium’s busiest stations.
The nearby Grand Place was also cleared.
“There were people crying; there were people shouting,” said Elisa Roux, a spokeswoman for the Belgian rail company SNCB. “There was a movement of panic.”
Hours after the incident the suspect’s body remained at the scene as bomb squads searched the area.
An Agence-France Presse journalist reported that a controlled explosion was heard several hours after the attack.
Social media images showed a fireball in a nearly empty underground hall.
“I went down to the mezzanine level, someone was shouting. Then he yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ and he blew up a wheeled suitcase,” railway employee Nicolas van Herrewegen told reporters.
“I was behind a wall when it exploded. I went down and alerted my colleagues to evacuate everyone. He [the suspect] was still around, but after that we didn’t see him,” Van Herrewegen said. “It wasn’t exactly a big explosion, but the impact was pretty big. People were running away.”
He described the suspect as well built and tanned with short hair, wearing a white shirt and jeans.
“I saw that he had something on him because I could see wires emerging, so it may have been a suicide vest,” Van Herrewegen said.
The federal crisis center said the situation was “under control” about an hour after the explosion, but kept the nation’s terror alert at level 3, the second highest.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel hailed the “courage” of security forces.
Soldiers have been deployed at railway stations and landmark buildings since the Paris terror attacks, when a link to Brussels was first established.
The nation’s law enforcement agencies and intelligence services came under intense scrutiny amid claims that a series of leads were missed after the Paris attacks that could have led to the Brussels bombers.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion