Six people were arrested on Thursday in a series of police raids in Brussels two days after attacks in the Belgian capital left 31 dead, while French authorities said they had thwarted an attack in that nation.
Three of the suspects in Belgium were detained “outside the door of the federal prosecutor’s office” a spokesman said. Two others were arrested in Brussels and a sixth was detained in Jette, on the outskirts.
Brussels, which is home to the headquarters of the EU and NATO, is still reeling from bombings at an airport and a metro station on Tuesday morning claimed by the Islamic State group.
Photo: AP
US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to arrive in Brussels yesterday in a show of solidarity, during which he is to pay tribute at the airport to the people killed and hold meetings with EU officials.
The attacks have also shown how exposed Europe has become to the threat from terrorists, four months after 130 people were killed in attacks in the French capital.
Highlighting the threat, French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said police had arrested a suspect in the Paris area who was in “the advanced stages” of a plot to attack the nation.
While the French national was not linked to the Paris or Brussels attacks, he said the man “belongs to a terrorist network that sought to strike our country.”
Two top Belgian officials offered to quit on Thursday after widespread criticism that the attackers — at least three of whom were known to authorities — had been allowed to slip through the net.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said the “attacks did not come as a surprise,” raising further questions over why international authorities failed to stop them.
Prosecutors said that Khalid El Bakraoui, named as the assailant at the Maalbeek metro station while his brother Ibrahim was named as a suicide bomber at the airport, was the subject of an international warrant for terrorism in relation to the Paris attacks.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel refused to accept the resignations of Minister of the Interior Jan Jambon and Minister of Justice Koen Geens over claims Ibrahim had been arrested and deported by Turkey, which had warned Belgium he was a “terrorist foreign fighter.”
“There were errors at Justice and with the [Belgian] liaison officer in Turkey,” Jambon told newspaper Le Soir.
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