The European Commission building in Brussels (AFP)
Belgian officials detained two suspects who planned a terrorist attack in the European Commission Headquarters in Brussels. Up to 400 Islamists from Belgium have gone to fight with ISIS in Syria. About 90 have returned back home.
Al Arabiya reported:
The Belgian authorities have prevented several attacks by jihadist fighters returning home from Syria and by sympathisers with the Islamic State extremist group, a report said Saturday.
The daily L’Echo cited unnamed sources as saying the planned attacks could have been similar to the one on the Jewish Museum in central Brussels in May which left four people dead.
The suspect in that case, Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, spent more than a year fighting with Islamist extremists in Syria and is now being held in Belgium on charges of “murder in a terrorist context”.
Up to 400 Belgian nationals are estimated to have gone to fight in Syria, with about 90 known to have returned home, L’Echo said.
“Our starting point is that among them, one out of nine aim to carry out an attack,” a source said. “That is a conservative estimate, if you also take into account the people who help them.”
The newspaper said its sources did not want to give details of the planned attacks nor of the operations to prevent them, for reasons of security and so as not to alarm the public.
