Fugitive suspected militant Salah Abdeslam, 26, slipped back home to Brussels from Paris shortly after the attacks, in which his elder brother Brahim blew himself up at a cafe.
Belgian soldiers and a police officer control the documents of a woman in a shopping street in central Brussels, November 21, 2015, after security was tightened in Belgium following the fatal attacks in Paris.
Belgium put the capital Brussels
on maximum security alert on Saturday, shutting the metro and warning
people to avoid crowds because of a "serious and imminent" threat of
coordinated, multiple attacks by militants.
A week
after Paris bombings and shootings carried out by Islamic State
militants, of whom one suspect from Brussels is at large, Brussels was
placed on the top level "four" in the government's threat scale after a
meeting of police, justice and intelligence officials.
Soldiers
were on guard in parts of Brussels, a city of 1.2 million people and
home to institutions of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO.
"The
result of relatively precise information pointed to the risk of an
attack along the lines of what took take place in Paris," Prime Minister
Charles Michel told a news conference on Saturday after a meeting of the national security council. The Paris attacks left 130 people dead.
"We
are talking about the threat that several individuals with arms and
explosives would launch an attack perhaps in several locations at the
same time," Michel said, adding people should be alert but not panic.
He declined to elaborate, but said the government would review the situation on Sunday afternoon.
The
metro system is to remain closed until then, in line with
recommendation of the government's crisis centre. Major shopping centres
and stores did open on Saturday morning, with soldiers deployed outside
shops.
The agency has called on local authorities
to cancel large events and postpone soccer matches, as well as stepping
up the military and police presence.
Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said that 1,000 troops were now available for patrols, double the level of a week earlier.
Fugitive suspected militant Salah Abdeslam,
26, slipped back home to Brussels from Paris shortly after the attacks,
in which his elder brother Brahim blew himself up at a cafe.
Fears
of the risk Salah Abdeslam still poses prompted the cancellation last
week of an international friendly soccer match in Brussels against
Spain. The crisis centre said weekend games in Belgium's two
professional divisions should now be postponed, but most outside
Brussels appeared set to go ahead.
BELGIUM AT HEART OF PARIS ATTACK PROBE
The
alert level for all of Belgium was raised following the Paris attacks
to level three out of four, implying a "possible or probable" threat.
Previously, only certain sites, such as the U.S. embassy, were at level
three.
Belgium, and its capital in particular,
have been at the heart of investigations into the Paris attacks - which
included suicide bombers targeting a France-Germany soccer match - after
the links to Brussels emerged. Three people detained in Brussels are
facing terrorism charges.
Federal prosecutors said on Saturday that weapons had been found at the home of a person charged on Friday.
EU
interior and justice ministers in Brussels on Friday pledged solidarity
with France in the wake of the Paris attacks and agreed a series of new
measures on surveillance, border checks and gun control.
French authorities have said the attacks were planned in Brussels by a local man, Abdelhamid Abaaoud,
28, who fought for Islamic State in Syria and was killed in a police
siege of an apartment in the Paris suburb of St. Denis on Wednesday.
Salah Abdeslam,
who was from the same Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek as Abaaoud
and is said by officials to have known Abaaoud in prison, was pulled
over three times by French police but not arrested as he was driven back
to Brussels early last Saturday by two of the men now in custody.
As well as Abdeslam's brother, a second man from Molenbeek, Bilal Hadfi, was also among the Paris suicide bombers.
Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon
told reporters he wanted a register of everyone living in Molenbeek
because it was not clear at present who was there, with authorities
conducting door-to-door checks of every house.
"The local administration should knock on every door and ask who really lives there," Jambon said.
The
last time any part of Belgium was put on maximum alert was in May 2014
when an Islamist gunman shot dead four people at the Jewish Museum in
Brussels. At that time, Jewish schools, synagogues and other
institutions were put on level four.
The capital
as a whole was last at the level four for about a month at the end of
2007 and the start of 2008, when authorities intercepted a plot to free
convicted Tunisian Nizar Trabelsi. Brussels' traditional New Year fireworks display was cancelled.
Trabelsi
was sentenced in Belgium in 2003 to 10 years for attempting to blow up a
Belgian military base that houses U.S. soldiers. He was extradited to
the United States in 2013.
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