In a country-wide counter-terrorism operation, Belgian police on Sunday raided four residences, arresting four Islamic State (IS) sympathizers previously flagged by state security. The authorities moved into action when it appeared that the group was actively planning a terrorist attack on a Brussels concert hall.
In a press release from the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party, MP and chairman of the Interior Committee Ortwin Depoortere said the foiled attack “evokes painful memories of previous IS attacks,” specifically referring to the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris in which 89 concertgoers lost their lives. “That almost a decade later such a tragedy would happen again is alarming.”
Depoortere leveled further accusations at the disgraced former Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne (centrist-liberal Open VLD) and his successor Paul Van Tigchelt (also Open VLD), under whose leadership Islamic radicalism had “been ignored for far too long.”
“In any case,” he concluded, “it is clear that the specter of Islamic terrorist danger is still not gone.”
The four would-be terrorists were to be arraigned today, March 4th, Belgian media report. The youngest, 15, lives in the East Flemish town of Ninove, and the oldest, 18, in Liège. The other two live in Brussels and Charleroi. The youngsters, who all speak French, met in an online chat group on Telegram. After an analysis of their conversations, in which they expressed admiration for IS, state security concluded they had been radicalized.
Before long, the teens’ chats went beyond passive admiration. The topic soon turned to planning a terrorist attack, for which they established the target location and provisional date at an undisclosed Brussels concert hall performance, for which they booked tickets in advance.
According to information obtained by Het Belang van Limburg, the concert hall targeted was the Botanique; its largest room, the Orangerie, can accommodate 650 people standing or 340 sitting.
With the date of the event approaching, a court decided on Sunday morning to have police take the suspected terrorists into preventive custody. No weapons or explosives were found during police searches.
Federal judicial police interrogated the four for an entire day in Liège, where the youths spent the night in custody. The oldest is likely to appear before a magistrate being tried as an adult. His three compatriots will probably appear before a juvenile court.
The would-be-terrorists’ relative youth comes as no surprise to Belgium’s intelligence agency. Although IS’ global influence has been waning in recent years—with operations mainly limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan—the ‘brand’ still exerts a strong pull on young Muslims living in the West.
Earlier this year, Staatsveiligheid (VSSE) warned in its annual intelligence report that more and more minors’ names were surfacing in dossiers related to ideological extremism. “They also seem to be getting younger and younger,” the report concluded. “Whereas previously 17- or 18-year-olds appeared in [our] investigations, now young people of say 16 and even 15 years of age stand out.”
The report goes on to mention that
most dossiers deal with young people who radicalize online, or incite others to hatred and violence. In a number of cases, these minors make threats through anonymous accounts on social media. After identification and investigation, it appears that they are often people who did not have the intention to resort to violence themselves.
A limited number of cases reveal threatening intentions, which will prompt the VSSE to inform judicial authorities.
Only last week, Belgium’s threat analysis authority—the Orgaan voor de Coördinatie en de Analyse van de Dreiging (OCAD)— warned that there were as many as 41% more terrorist and extremist threats in 2023 compared to the year before. In total, 332 threat reports were recorded, about 7% of which were of a serious nature.
The OCAD believes that the October 7th Hamas pogrom and its aftermath—and last October’s killing of two Swedish tourists by IS sympathizer Abdesalem Lassoued—are major influences on the increase in threat reporting.
