Belgian counter-terrorism police are looking into the identity of a suspected suicide bomber who was killed by guards at a Belgium railway station after he set off explosives that didn’t hurt anyone. The attacker shouted Allahu Akbar and was killed.
The attacker was identified as a 36-year-old Moroccan national not known to authorities for being involved in terror activities, federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt told reporters. He declined to say if the man had a criminal record.
“We consider this to be a terrorist attack,” prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told reporters, declining to comment on witness accounts that the man yelled militant slogans before detonating one or two luggage devices.
Even though no one was hurt, evening commuters raced for cover in the wake of smoke billowing from Central Station and the widespread awareness of Islamic State attacks in the city last year as well as elsewhere, including in Britain, France, and elsewhere.
In the historic city center, between the station and the nearby Grand Place, Brussels’ iconic Renaissance town square, police stopped rail traffic, evacuated the location, and cleared streets packed with tourists and locals enjoying a hot summer evening.
Since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell orchestrated the November 2015 attack in Paris that resulted in the deaths of 130 people, the Belgian capital, which is also home to the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, has been on high alert. 32 people were killed in their hometown city by associates of those attackers four months later.
Since then, attacks in the name of the Syria-based militant group have been carried out by other young men, many of whom are locals, in France, Germany, Sweden, and most recently, Britain. This has raised concerns about additional violence in a city where almost a quarter of the 1.2 million people are Muslims.
“In Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere, such isolated acts will continue. Former French agent and Brussels security consultant Claude Moniquet told RTL that it was inevitable.
He stated that attacks in Europe could increase, despite the fact that many would be carried out by “amateurs” causing little harm, as Islamic State is under pressure in Syria, where Belgium has been the most popular recruiting ground for foreign militants.
He compared the incident on Tuesday to one that occurred a day earlier on Paris’ Champs-Elysees avenue, where a man was killed when he drove his car full of weapons and explosives into a French police convoy. There were no other injuries.
Nicolas Van Herrewegen, a rail worker, told Reuters that he was going downstairs to the underground platforms that serve suburban and long-distance lines that run under the city center.
He stated, “There was a man shouting, shouting, and shouting.” He was talking about the militants and things like that when he yelled: He shouted “Allahu Akbar” and blew up the small suitcase he was carrying. People just ran away.” He said that the man was quite dark, had short hair, and was dressed in black jeans and a white shirt.
A 23-year-old lawyer named Remy Bonnaffe claimed that while he was listening to music on his headphones, he was startled by an explosion while waiting on the concourse for a train back to Ghent.
