2015-01-16 11:55:00

Belgium on high terrorism alert after shootout with police


(Reuters) - Belgian security forces were on high alert on Friday after police killed two gunmen recently returned from Syria during one of several raids across the country against an Islamist network suspected of planning imminent attacks.

Daily routines for most were little changed, a day after the bloodshed in the eastern town of Verviers, but there was additional security at some public buildings, notably police stations which officials said were the group's planned target.

Some Jewish schools in Belgium and the Netherlands were closed, reflecting the heightening of an atmosphere of caution that has prevailed across Europe since Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris last week at a Jewish grocery and the offices of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Belgian officials were expected to give more details of their investigation on Friday but have said they had no grounds to see a link to the French attacks for now. A separate inquiry is probing whether the Paris gunmen obtained arms in Belgium.

A third man in Verviers was under arrest and being questioned as was a suspect in Brussels, where several sites were raided in the city and its surrounding suburbs.

A former Belgian counter-terrorism chief told public broadcaster RTBF that the Charlie Hebdo attacks could have prompted Belgian police, who say they already had the suspects under surveillance, to bring forward the arrests.

"Paris may have speeded things up, in the sense that every country in Europe is on alert," said Andre Jacob. "Some information that may have been barely 'ripe' has been acted on quicker than planned ... because the threat was real."

The fact that the two unidentified men opened fire with assault weapons on police who called at the apartment in Verviers showed the danger the group posed, Jacob added.

On Thursday, prosecutors said the suspects had been on the point of launching "terrorist attacks on a grand scale".

All three Verviers suspects were citizens of Belgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.

Other raids on the homes of men returned from the civil war there were conducted across the country, notably in several districts of the capital Brussels, prosecutors said.

Earlier on Thursday, in an apparently unrelated development, police detained a man in southern Belgium whom they suspected of supplying weaponry to Amedy Coulibaly, killer of four people at the Paris Jewish grocery after the Charlie Hebdo attack.








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