Belgium - Machete-wielding attacker

[robert99]

Belgian police attacker shot and killed in Charleroi - BBC News
Machete-wielding attacker strikes Belgian police officers | News | DW.COM | 06.08.2016
The man who attacked two female police officers with a machete in Charleroi, Belgium, has died after being shot by police. Belgium's Prime Minister has said "preliminary indications" say it was an act of terrorism.

Police in Charleroi, a city 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Brussels, tweeted that two officers had been injured by an assailant who shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) during the attack.

The assailant later died of his injuries in hospital, according to local police.

(http://www.brusselstimes.com/belgiu...ial-forces-operations-since-the-paris-attacks
Federal police Special forces have organised 51 operations since the Paris attacks on the 13th of November last year, De Morgen and Het Laatste Nieuws reported on Saturday.

The Commissioner in charge of the Special forces, Ivo Vereycken, explained that these large-scale operations are divided into three categories: mobile arrest of suspects, ‘reinforced arrests’, and ‘callouts’. Callouts aim to force a suspect out of their hiding place.

This last type of operation is the one used to arrest Salah Abdeslam in Molenbeek on the 18th of March.

Mr Vereycken said Special forces organised around 20 dangerous operations a year at the end of the 1980s. “We never thought it would get this bad”, he said. )

 

[Second Summer]

We've been to Charleroi! Some of my wife's ancestors came from there. It looked like a somewhat impoverished, post-industrial depressed town. This attack won't help the town's reputation.

 

[robert99]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/w...esponsibility-for-belgium-machete-attack.html
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Saturday against two police officers in Charleroi, Belgium, according to a statement issued on Sunday by the group’s Amaq News Agency.

Two police officers were severely wounded in the face and neck at a security checkpoint at the entrance to a police station in Charleroi by a man wielding a machete and shouting “Allahu akbar.” The assailant was shot and died later in a hospital.

The statement called the assailant a “soldier of the Islamic State” who had carried out the attack “in response to calls to target citizens of countries belonging to the crusader coalition,” a reference to nations involved in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The language was nearly identical to claims of responsibility issued by the Islamic State for other attacks in recent weeks, including an ax attack by an Afghan refugee in Würzburg, Germany, and the killing of a priest in the Normandy region of France.

 

[robert99]

(Every disturbed person in Europe seems to want to hack people to death. I suppose we're lucky that if it was the US they would have high powered guns)
Machete-wielding woman shot by Brussels cops
PressTV-Woman runs amok in Brussels with machete
Brussels police have shot a woman after she seriously wounded three people with a machete.

According to Belgian media reports, the woman attacked people who were alighting from a bus in the Uccle suburb of Brussels on Monday.

Two of the victims were severely wounded, while a third suffered minor injuries.

The attacker was also taken to hospital because police shot her in the arm after she refused to drop her weapon.

Police sources said the woman was of Asian descent and has a history of mental illness, noting that the incident is most probably not terror-related.

 

[robert99]

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...s-two-people-suspected-of-militant-links.html
Two people were detained in Belgium on Friday, both suspected of links to ISIS militants, federal prosecutors said.

Police searched three houses across the country, including one in Brussels, part of an ongoing investigation into what prosecutors said was “the activities of a terrorist group.”

 

[robert99]

Belgium charges four suspects over IS group recruiting network - France 24
Belgian prosecutors on Wednesday charged four people with participating in a terrorist organisation, including funding and recruiting would-be fighters to join the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.

The terror-related charges were announced after 15 early morning raids in the northern cities of Ghent, Antwerp and Deinze, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement.

"Those persons have been indicted for participation in the activities of a terrorist group," the statement said.

"Some of them are suspected of recruiting people with a view to departing to Syria and joining Islamic State there," it added.

The Begian prosecutors added that no arms or explosives were found, and that there was of yet no established link with the suicide bomb attacks that killed 32 people in Brussels last March.