A spokeswoman for the local police service in southern Brussels said two officers were lightly wounded in an initial incident and a third was also slightly hurt later.
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“We have been very lucky”, said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. “It could have been a drama”.
The major anti-terror operation, which lasted more than three hours, paralyzed an entire neighborhood of the Belgian capital, with schools and a day care center placed on lockdown and autoworkers at a nearby Audi plant instructed not to leave by management.
A masked Belgian policeman secures the area from a rooftop near the scene where shots were fired during a police search of a house in the suburb of Forest near Brussels, Belgium, March 15, 2016.
The prosecutors office plans to hold a press conference at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday in Brussels. He said many people fled the area when they heard gunfire.
Another official said that the anti-terror raid in the Forest neighborhood was linked to the Paris attacks on November 13 that killed 130 people.
Werts and Eric Van der Spyt, his office’s spokesman, said a decision would be made later on whether to hold or release the two.
At least one suspect is still thought to be on the run.
Abdeslam, who is believed to have played a key logistical role in the attacks, fled across the border to Belgium hours after the killings in Paris and is now one of the most wanted men in Europe.
The Belgian probe into the Paris attacks has already revealed that the November 13 events were prepared and organized in the capital of neighboring Belgium. Hadfi blew himself up outside the Stade de France stadium in Paris the night of the attacks and Abaaoud was killed in a police raid in a Paris suburb soon after.
A French police source said the operation was focused on the associates of one, or several, of 11 people who have been charged in Belgium in connection with the Paris attacks.
Three of law enforcement officials, including a German authorities lady, were injured after starting the doorway of the condo within the Rue du Dries they’d arrived at research once they were dismissed upon. Streets around the house in the city’s southern borough of Forest were sealed off by police.
Two other suspects were being sought, it added. Several hundred spectators gathered, hooded officers wearing body armor milled about and ambulances stood at the ready.
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Belgian authorities have stepped up their counterterror efforts since a lone gunman killed four people at the Brussels Jewish museum in May 2014. The small Western European country has also been prime recruiting ground for ISIL, and officials freely acknowledge their concerns about what radicalised recruits might do after returning home from the battlefields of Syria or Iraq.
