Anti-terror police operation in Verviers leaves two dead, day after Belgium man with ties to Paris kosher supermarket terrorist turns himself in to authorities; 'We've averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo', police officer says.
Report: Two dead in anti-terrorism raid in Belgium
Anti-terror police operation in Verviers leaves two dead, day after Belgium man with ties to Paris kosher supermarket terrorist turns himself in to authorities; 'We've averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo', police officer says.
Belgian public television channel RTBF said on its website that it had reports of two people being killed during a police counter-terrorism raid in Verviers in the east of the country.
Public service radio RTBF said there were no casualties among the security forces involved. Two unidentified people were killed and a third seriously wounded. Several others were detained.
Scene of incident in Belgium
RTBF said it was an operation intended to check on suspected radicals – one of several being conducted against people believed to have returned to Belgium after taking part in the Syrian civil war.
Local media said gunshots and several explosions were heard on a residential street in Verviers near the railway station and one photo posted by a witness on Twitter showed police vehicles and ambulances blocking the street
Belgium has seen significant radical Islamist activity among its Muslim population. RTBF said police raids were also under way in Brussels. Belga news agency said police were hunting a man who witnesses said had brandished a weapon and shouted religious slogans in Arabic at a Brussels metro station.
In a report that could not be immediately confirmed, the Web site of La Meuse newspaper quoted an unidentified police officer saying: "We've averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo."
The event followed a new developments in the investigation intoAmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist behind the kosher supermarket attackand the killing of a French policewoman, after a Belgium man turned himself in to authorities, saying he had been in touch with Coulibaly.
Belgian anti-terror raid in Verviers
Belgian authorities have detained a man for arms dealing and are investigating whether he supplied Coulibaly weapons for the attacks, prosecutors said Thursday.
Belgian media reported that a man had handed himself in to police in the southern city of Charleroi on Tuesday, saying he had been in touch with Coulibaly.
According to the reports, the man said that he swindled Coulibaly in a car sale, but police later found evidence that the two were negotiating about the sale of ammunition for a 7.62 mm caliber firearm.
Bullets of this caliber are needed for the Tokarev pistol that Coulibaly used in his attack on the supermarket in Paris, where he killed four hostages, and possibly in the shooting and injuring of a jogger two days earlier.
"The man is being held by the judge in Charleroi on suspicion of arms dealing," a spokesman for Belgium's federal prosecution said. "Further investigations will have to show whether there is a link with the events in Paris," he added.
Coulibaly was killed on January 9 in an assault conducted by an elite French unit after he took hostages and killed four Jewish-Frenchman at a Kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. He acted in coordination, he said, with Cherif and Said Kouachi who killed twelve people in the attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
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