This will be far from a normal Saturday in Brussels. The Belgian capital is at the country’s highest terror alert level.
The warning from the Crisis Centre of the Belgian Interior Ministry cites “a serious and imminent threat that requires taking specific security measures as well as specific recommendations for the population.”
It advised the public to avoid places where large groups gather — such as concerts, sporting events, airports and train stations — and comply with security checks. The rest of the nation will maintain its current terror level.
Why now?
If people take the terror alert seriously, Brussels will be “shut down tomorrow,” CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.
“It suggests they have something specific and credible at the intelligence front pointing them in the direction that there may be a terrorist plot in the works,” he said. “It also suggests they don’t have a handle on it, that they don’t know where these plotters are or where they’re coming from.”
The increase in alert level for Brussels comes as authorities investigating last week’s terror attacks in Paris conduct raids in Belgium as they work to identify and take down the network of terrorists behind the carnage.
The man they’re looking for
Salah Abdeslam, 26, is the subject of an international search warrant. He was last seen driving toward the Belgian border when police stopped and questioned him a few hours after the attacks, not knowing that he was allegedly involved. His whereabouts are unknown.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Abdeslam is one of two brothers allegedly involved in last week’s coordinated attacks at the Bataclan concert hall, outside the French national soccer stadium and at restaurants in Paris. Though he’s a French national, he was born in Belgium.
Fertile ground
That’s one of several connections between this latest attack and Belgium, a country seen as fertile ground for jihadist recruiters. It’s where members of a suspected terror cell waged a deadly gun battle in January with police and where three Americans in August overpowered a radical Islamist gunman on a Paris-bound train.
It was also home to suspected ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud. He was killed duringa raid that shook the Saint-Denis neighborhood outside Paris and collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Abaaoud “played a decisive role” in the Paris attacks and played a part in four of six terror attacks foiled since spring, with one alleged jihadist claiming Abaaoud had trained him personally.
He was once allegedly involved in gangs in Molenbeek. Because of its links to terror plots, Belgian special operations forces raided that impoverished Brussels suburb on Monday. As the week went on,
Then on Thursday, Belgian authorities detained nine people in raids across the country, the federal prosecutor’s office said. Seven of those people were questioned after six raids around Brussels related to Bilal Hadfi, one of the men who blew himself up outside the Stade de France.
France’s state of emergency
The French Parliament on Friday extended its state of emergency by three months, following last week’s terror attacks that left 130 people dead.
France’s constitutional council still has to review the bill, but no problems are expected..
Authorities had been using the state of emergency declared by President Francois Hollande to carry out a widespread clampdown on potential terrorist threats, detaining dozens of people, putting more than 100 others under house arrest and seizing an alarming array of weapons.
France has about 10,000 military personnel deployed across the country in addition to 100,000 police officers and gendarmes, plus 5,500 customs officials, according to Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Since the attacks last Friday, 164 people considered dangerous have been placed under house arrest, he said.
Woman didn’t kill herself
Meanwhile, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that Hasna Ait Boulahcen, the woman found dead after the police raid in Saint-Denis, did not blow herself up as preliminary information had suggested.
Instaed, a man wearing a suicide device was the one that detonated, the prosecutor’s office told CNN. No other details were immediately available.
Boulahcen, 26, was a relative of Abaaoud, official sources in France told CNN.
Friends of her family in their hometown of Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, said she had lived there until recently. Residents in the area told CNN authorities had taken her mother and brother into custody. And the Paris prosecutor’s office told CNN that police were searching the mother’s home.
France wants wider anti-ISIS coalition
On Friday, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution penned by France that gathers international support for counterterrorism efforts, specifically aimed toward ISIS.
The resolution calls on all member states to take all necessary measures in compliance with international law to “redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically” by ISIS and urges states to “intensify their efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Iraq and Syria.”
Hollande said he would appeal to world leaders to form a wider coalition to go after ISIS, including meeting next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.(Ed Payne, Michael Martinez and Margot Haddad,)
Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/21/world/paris-attacks/index.html
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