Can we stop calling these ‘isolated incidents’ now?
Before everyone had a chance to switch over their hashtags to show their London sympathies, we have another event in Antwerp.
Belgian police intercepted a car that was speeding toward a busy shopping area and refused to stop, authorities said Thursday.
The car, registered in France, was driving “at a very high speed” in central Antwerp, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said.
French President Francois Hollande called the incident “an attempted terrorist attack.” — CNN
Whatever he was attempting to accomplish. He failed. He was apprehended. And his car was impounded.
Police in the northern Belgian city of Antwerp said on Thursday they had detained a man who tried to enter the main pedestrianised shopping street in a car at high speed, adding security in the city would be stepped up.
“At about 11 am this morning a vehicle entered De Meir at high speed due to which pedestrians had to jump away,” a police spokesman told a news conference, referring to the street name.
The Belgian prosecutor’s office said a 39 year old man had been arrested and that police found knives, a shotgun and a gas can with an unknown liquid in the car. —Telegraph
Bart De Wever, the mayor of Antwerp, increased the state of alert and added police security in busy neighborhoods, including shopping areas, transportation hubs, monuments and museums. The ministry of defense was sending additional troops to patrol.
It was one day after Belgium observed the first anniversary of the deadliest attack on its soil, when suicide bombers in Brussels assaulted the main airport and a subway station, killing 32 people.
Antwerp is the second most important hub for radicalization in Belgium, and only Brussels has sent more people from the country to fight for Islamists in Syria.
The city is home to the now-banned and defunct terrorist group Sharia4Belgium, but Antwerp has so far averted a large-scale terrorist attack, and the local authorities have succeeded in foiling several plots and convicting dozens of terrorists in court over the last three years. — NY Times
And that detail the other guys wouldn’t mention?
Cops in the Belgian city reportedly foiled the plot and detained the 39-year-old man, who is a French national of Tunisian descent and was carrying weapons, after he ran a through a red traffic light, Antwerp police chief Serge Muyters said.
Right.
Shocker.
Bet he’ll be a ‘lone wolf’, too.
