A district of derelict warehouses, red-brick terraces and vibrant street life on the canals north-west of the centre of Brussels, Molenbeek was once known as Belgium’s “Little Manchester”. The country has the dubious distinction of seeing more residents, per capita, traveling to Syria to fight with ISIS, he said.
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“Reinforced border checks have been established on the borders within the framework especially of a close collaboration with the French authorities”, according to Belgium’s national centre for threat evaluation, OCAM.
It has emerged at least one of three suicide bombers who blew themselves up near the Stade de France soccer stadium on Friday night was stopped from entering the stadium where an 81,000 strong crowd including president Francois Hollande were watching a France match against Germany.
Earlier Saturday, British officials called in explosive specialists and evacuated the North Terminal at Gatwick Airport after a French man disposed of what appeared to be a firearm. Three people could be seen clinging to upper-floor balcony railings in a desperate bid to stay out of the line of fire.
The Belgian prosecutor’s office opened an anti-terrorism investigation Saturday into the Paris attacks that killed 129 people following arrests in a Brussels neighbourhood, FRANCE 24 reported.
The Belgian prosecutors declined to comment on whether those arrested were previously known to authorities or whether any of them were in Paris on Friday.
“Multiple arrests and search warrants have been executed”, Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutors’ office, told reporters at a press briefing that started at about 7:30 p.m. local time. “This act committed by the terrorist army, Islamic State, is against who we are, against a free country that speaks to the whole world”.
Three of the eight suspects in the Paris terror attacks lived in Brussels, according to reports in Belgian media. The man who rented the auto was “as far as we know, still alive”, he said.
A Greek police source said the passport’s owner was a young man who had arrived in Leros on a small vessel from Turkey with a group of 69 refugees and had his fingerprints taken by Greek officials.
And a second gunman was also found with a passport of a Syrian man born in 1980.
Terror experts had been expecting a few kind of attack but did not think ISIS capable of carrying off something on the scale of Friday’s terror, he said.
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Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe says the “scale of the attacks and the range of weaponry used by the terrorists are a serious cause for concern”.
