Terror alert raised in Belgium
Terrorists linked to Al Qaeda made specific mention of Belgium in conversations about a planned attack, the state security services announced last week. Federal interior minister Joëlle Milquet raised the terror alert to level three (out of four) as a result of the intelligence
NSA snooping reveals “concrete indications” of planned attack
The information comes from telephone taps carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, which led to a number of US embassies in the Middle East and Africa being closed and diplomatic personnel withdrawn.
“I’m not going to go into detail, but when the co-ordination centre for risk analysis raises the alert level, I think we can assume there were concrete reasons for doing so,” said Alain Winants, administratorgeneral of the state security service. Winants stressed that his services have had no direct contact with the NSA, which has recently been the subject of controversy surrounding telephone and other surveillance carried out on domestic and foreign targets, including EU offices and missions in Brussels.
Examples of measures taken last week included heightened security at airports, A Dutch police presence on trains crossing the border from the Netherlands and security patrols at Brussels South station and some embassies. The heightened state of alert also led to several incidents:
• An alarm was raised at the Kleine Brogel military base in Limburg, where nuclear weapons are said to be stockpiled, when a bicycle was spotted fastened to a perimeter fence. A blue box was attached to the bicycle but was found by the army bomb squad DOVO to be harmless.
• A suspect package discovered at the Zaventem city railway station (not the Brussels Airport station) also turned out to be innocent, as did one found in the metro station Rogier in central Brussels, and another at Brussels South.
• Another suspect package, however, did contain a bomb. However, the device found by cleaning staff at Leuven’s train station last weekend was described as “an amateur construction”, more likely to have been planted by students or anarchists than by terrorists, according to Milquet. During the investigation, however, an area of the station and part of the city centre were closed.
“This is simply the reaction you’d hope for,” explained security expert Brice De Ruyver. “It’s not a matter of panic or paranoia. The whole point of a terror alert is to make people more alert to things they normally wouldn’t pay attention to. You can’t take a risk with suspect packages.”
