Tightening security around embassies, sites related to Jewish culture and other potential terrorist targets, Belgium deployed scores of heavily armed paratroopers on Saturday in its capital, Brussels, and in the port city of Antwerp, a diamond-trading center with a large Orthodox Jewish population.
It was the first time Belgian troops had been mobilized on the streets in more than two decades.
The measures followed a police raid in the east of the nation on Thursday last week that killed two men suspected of planning what officials said was an imminent and substantial terrorist attack.
hoto: Reuters
The foiled plot added to fears across Europe that militants — particularly Europeans who have returned home after fighting in Syria or Iraq alongside the Islamic State group and other extremist organizations — are planning attacks similar to, or inspired by, a recent series of acts carried out in France by three Muslim extremists.
However, Belgian officials said they have so far found no link between the attack they say was being planned from a militant hideout in the eastern town of Verviers and the Paris attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, a police patrol and a kosher supermarket.
At the US embassy in Brussels, two Belgian soldiers from the 3rd Parachute Battalion, based in the southeastern town of Bastogne, said they had arrived on Saturday as part of a security operation coordinated with the police.
Troops also stood guard outside the Jewish Museum, the scene of an attack in May last year by a French militant who had returned from Syria.
However, the troops were barely visible in much of the city, which is home to the headquarters of both the EU and NATO.
Local news media outlets quoted Belgian Minister of Defense Steven Vandeput as saying that the initial deployment involved just 150 soldiers, a number that could rise to 300 in the coming days if necessary.
The national government, led by Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, decided to mobilize the military at a meeting of ministers and security officials on Friday, after Belgium elevated its terrorism alert to “level three” from “level two,” on a scale of one to four.
The level was raised on Thursday after the police raided what they believed was a militant cell in Verviers, killing two suspects in a gunfight and finding weapons, police uniforms and walkie-talkies.
A Belgian newspaper, Derniere Heure, reported on Saturday that investigators had identified the possible mastermind of the plot disrupted on Thursday as Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 27-year-old Belgian of Moroccan descent from the Molenbeek District, where police have raided a number of homes and made at least nine arrests in recent days.
The newspaper said Abaaoud, also known as Abou Omar Soussi, was not believed to be in Belgium, but in Greece or Turkey.
He is known to authorities after the release early last year of a video by Islamic State extremists in Syria that officials said showed him in a pickup dragging four corpses.
A spokesman for the Greek police said an investigation was under way after Belgian authorities provided details of suspects purportedly linked to a Muslim militant cell in Belgium.
“We cannot say anything about any arrests at the moment,” the official said, responding to reports that four people had been detained in Greece. “An investigation is under way following information supplied by the Belgian authorities over the past 48 hours.” He said there would be an announcement “when we have concrete results.”
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