The city will stay on its highest level of alert for at least a week, he said, although plans call for schools and the metro to be gradually reopened beginning today.
Advertisement
On Monday, police in the southern Paris suburb of Montrouge were investigating an apparent suicide explosives belt found in a trash bin.
The Belgian government has also ordered health and emergency services to take precautionary measures to ensure their services are not infiltrated by extremists.
She says, “When ambulances arrive, we have to see from where they come, who is in it. Really as a precaution”.
Fearing an imminent Paris-style attack, Belgium has extended a maximum security alert in Brussels until next Monday. Authorities detained 16 people, but released all but one of them the following day.
Esther Willems, assistant manager at the Galler chocolate shop in the heart of Brussels’ city center, suspected the alert level had scared away tourists and said he hoped things would start to improve on Wednesday, once the subways and schools begin reopening. Otherwise, he said, “you don’t impose terror level 4”, the highest possible.
Jambon refused to elaborate what kind of attacks the government believed had been planned.
About half of the city’s subway stations remain closed.
Special measures are being taken at primary and secondary schools plus universities, with student movements limited around or outside school buildings during the day.
Some children looked visibly anxious as they arrived, but most gave a friendly handshake to a burly school official guarding the entrance alongside the police officers.
Roberti said a European ant-terror prosecutor could coordinate efforts to “fight money-laundering and fiscal paradises because it’s there where the problem lurks”. “Even if something happens in Paris or in Brussels, they have to go back to school”, he said, adding he had instructed his children be extra attentive and to tell their teachers if they saw anything unusual.
Belgian national Abaaoud was killed with his female cousin and another man in a ferocious shootout with police at an apartment in northern Paris five days after the series of shootings and suicide bombings on November 13 in which 130 people were killed.
Belgium’s state prosecutor, in a statement announcing details of other people charged in the case, said on Tuesday it had issued an global arrest warrant for Mohamed Abrini, who was seen with Abdeslam two days before the attacks. He was accompanied by Salah Abdeslam in a gas station at Ressons situated on the highway to Paris.
Four people have been handed terrorism charges in Belgium since the Paris attacks, which have been traced to a network of people with ties to both France and Belgium. Although he was stopped and checked by French authorities, he was allowed to pass as his name had not yet become known.
Abdeslam remains at large, 11 days after the carnage in Paris. He was killed Wednesday in a standoff with French police.
Speaking on RTL radio, Mohamed Abdeslam said he shares the pain of victims’ families and wishes he and his family could have done something to prevent the November 13 bloodshed. “At this point, he was only a few dozen metres from the Comptoire Voltaire [where Brahim Abdeslam blew himself up]”, a source close to the inquiry told “Le Parisien”.
He said his brothers had shown no signs of radicalization.
The hunt for Abdeslam has stretched to several countries in Western Europe, but so far, he hasn’t been spotted since authorities named him as a suspect.
Advertisement
President Barack Obama is among the many leaders expected to arrive starting this weekend for the United Nations climate talks that start Monday.
