Sunday, June 19, 2016
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
PARIS — The police raided dozens of sites across Belgium and brought in 40 people for questioning in an operation to interrupt a terrorist plot to attack fans gathering to watch a televised soccer match between the Belgian and Irish national teams, government officials said on Saturday.
Three Belgians were charged with an attempt to commit terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group, the Belgian federal prosecutors’ office said. The others brought in for questioning were released by Saturday evening.
Prime Minister Charles Michel did not provide specifics in his comments after an emergency national security meeting. But Justice Minister Koen Geens and Deputy Prime Minister Kris Peeters, questioned by the Flemish broadcaster VRT, confirmed that the police had learned of a plot to attack fans gathering to watch the game Saturday on large screens in Brussels’s squares or at bars.
The police did not turn up guns or explosives, a statement said, and spectators watched the game without incident. Belgium won the game, 3-0, in Bordeaux, France.
The scale of the raids and arrests, three months after the attacks in Brussels that killed 32 people, suggested in part that the Belgian authorities were working to dispel doubts about their dedication to rooting out potential terrorists.
It also suggested that they believed they were in a race to prevent attacks. An earlier statement from the prosecutors’ office on Saturday said the situation required “immediate intervention.”
Investigations are continuing into the Brussels attacks on March 22 and those in and around Paris in November, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds. The plot to attack soccer fans, however, did not appear to be related directly to the Paris and Brussels attacks.
The prosecutors’ office identified each of the three arrested suspects by his given name and an initial for his surname: Samir C., 27; Moustapha B., 40; and Jawad B., 29.
Before the raids Friday night, the most recent terror-related detention in Belgium had come earlier in the week, when federal prosecutors announced the detention and investigation of a man identified as Youssef E. A., 30, in connection with the March attacks in Brussels. He was charged on Friday with “participation in a terrorist group, terrorist murders and attempted terrorist murders as a perpetrator, co-perpetrator or accomplice.”
This month, another man, Ali E. H. A., 31, was similarly charged. The broadness of the charges in both cases suggests that the authorities have yet to determine what role the two men may have played.
After the Paris attacks, the Belgian authorities were accused of being insufficiently vigilant when it emerged that the attacks had been planned in Belgium and that the explosives had been manufactured there.
Most of the attackers were Belgian or French citizens.
Adding to the pressure on the Belgian authorities was information disseminated this month by the Belgian Coordinating Body for Threat Analysis. That government body, which evaluates intelligence and other terrorism-related information, sent an alert to the police saying extremists who had fought in Syria were headed for Belgium and France.
While the warning was based on “raw intelligence,” according to the Belgian authorities, its wide distribution to police services and its leak to a Belgian French-language newspaper suggested that it was being taken very seriously.
In the course of questioning detainees thought to be connected to the Paris and Brussels attacks, investigators in Belgium have picked up several references to the possibility of attacks during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament in France, which lasts through July 10. Both France and Belgium are on high alert.
Meanwhile, in the case of a police officer and his female companion who were stabbed to death in France on Monday night, the prosecutors’ office announced that it had opened an investigation and placed two people in preventive detention: Charaf-Din Aberouz and Saad Rajraji. Both men had been sentenced along with the presumed killer of the couple — Larossi Abballa, who was fatally shot — in a 2013 terrorism case but were released from prison.
They are facing preliminary charges of participation in a terrorist group that intended to commit one or many crimes.