TerrorismBelgian police raids operational Islamist terror cells in four cities

The Belgian federal police on Thursday evening raided a residential building in Verviers, a town of about 60,000 residents seventy-five miles east of Brussels, located between Liège and the Belgium-German border, killing two suspected terrorists and seriously injuring a third. The injured individual is a Chechen who has been followed by Belgian security services since he entered Belgium.

There were no casualties among the security forces.

Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for the office of Belgian federal prosecutor, said the raid was an operational Islamic cell of young men who came back from Syria. He also said that although the cell members were under surveillance, a decision was made to launch the raid today because the cell members were gearing up to launch a terrorist attack.

“All I can tell you now is that we intervened on a terrorist cell planning attacks in Belgium,” Van der Sypt said by telephone.

In a press conference held a few hours later, Van der Spyt said a terrorist outrage may only have been hours away: “This operation stopped a major terrorist attack from taking place. You could say a second potential Paris has been averted.”

The three suspected terrorists barricaded themselves in an apartment and fired at the special units of the federal police for several minutes, using military weaponry and handguns, before they were neutralized, Van Der Sypt said, “The group was on the point of committing a major, imminent attack in Belgium,” he said.

He described the three heavily armed gunmen as an “operational cell” comprising individuals who had recently returned from Syria and were preparing “imminent terrorist attacks on a grand scale.”

Police sources said that bugs planted in the apartments and cars of Belgian Muslims who returned from fighting with ISIS in Syria revealed that several of them were planning simultaneous attacks on police stations in four Belgian cities – and that the attack was imminent.

Belgium RTBF Info TV Web site reports that the raid in Verviers was part of a broader effort by the Belgian police to track and disrupt the activities Islamists known to have fought in Syria.

At the same time that the raid on the house in Verviers was unfolding, special police units carried out at least a dozen raids elsewhere in Belgium in what was a coordinated operations. They focused on neighborhoods which are predominantly populated by Muslim immigrants in at least four districts in and around Brussels, with explosives reportedly found in the western Brussels area of Anderlecht.

In his press conference, Van der Sypt said that on Wednesday Belgian authorities had arrested a man in Charleroi, south of Brussels, on suspicion of supplying weapons to would-be Islamist terrorist in Belgium. He said the authorities were now investigating whether that arms dealer’s activities were linked to the attacks in and near Paris last week, especially whether he was the one who sold arms to Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four shoppers in a kosher store in Paris last Friday.

The Guardian reports that Belgium has a history in recent years as a European center for radical Islamist activity. Authorities and studies by Britain’s International Center for the Study of Radicalization have estimated that about 300 Belgians have travelled to Syria, which, for a country of eleven million people, is the highest per capita number of jihadists. This compares with about 600 jihadist fighters who have left the United Kingdom, with six times the population, to fight in Syria and Iraq.

One of Belgium’s most notorious jihadist organizations — Sharia4Belgium — is in the midst of an ongoing trial in Antwerp in which forty-six members of the group have been charged with belonging to a terrorist organization and persuading young men to fight a holy war in Syria.