2023-10-16 22:41:00
After Arras, Friday October 13, it was Brussels which suffered, this Monday evening, a new deadly Islamist attack, echoing the violence which has shaken the Middle East since the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 in Israel.
Armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a handgun, a terrorist claiming to be from the Islamic State and wanting to “avenge Muslims” killed two people and injured two others in the center of the Belgian capital .
Kalashnikov
Video images taken by residents show a bearded man, dressed in an orange jacket and wearing a cap, getting off a scooter near Place Sainctelette and firing several Kalashnikov shots at passers-by.
Several victims then tried to take refuge in the hall of a neighboring building, Boulevard d’Ypres, but the shooter followed them and opened fire again. A victim, who was trying to escape onto the sidewalk, trips and falls. The killer retraces his steps and fires another shot in his direction.
Other images show him getting back on his scooter and fleeing. In the evening, he was still wanted by the police who were carrying out a veritable manhunt in the streets of Brussels.
According to a police spokesperson, the two deceased people were supporters of the Swedish football team, which was playing this evening against Belgium in the Euro qualifiers at the King Baudouin stadium in Brussels.
Chicago Attentat
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, the Ministers of the Interior and Justice and the security services were summoned to an emergency meeting at the government crisis center. The federal prosecutor’s office was seized of the investigation. The alert level, which was at 2, was raised by the police to 4, the maximum.
The killer, still wearing his orange jacket, subsequently posted a video on social networks in which he claims, facing the camera, in Arabic with a Tunisian accent, that he is a member of the Islamic State (Daesh). and that one “lives and dies for one’s religion.”
In another post, published before the attack, he mentions the murder of a Muslim child stabbed to death with twenty-six stab wounds on Saturday in Chicago, in the United States, by a man who claimed to want to avenge the massacres perpetrated by Hamas . If the 6-year-old child killed had been a Christian, “we would have called it terrorism and not a brutal crime,” says the killer.
On site, this Monday evening, a witness told the scene to the Belgian newspaper DH Les Sports : “It was 7 p.m., I was going home. In an adjacent street, I hear gunshots and directly a crowd including (I see) law enforcement officers. I saw the victim less than five meters away, a man around 40 years old. And then, a black Mercedes Vito with two or three bullet holes. Inside, the driver was dead. The injured passenger, half his body full of blood, but conscious. »
Quran burned
The fact that the terrorist attacked people wearing the Swedish team jersey is probably linked to the incidents which have taken place in recent months in Sweden, where Korans have been burned by anti-Muslim activists.
An Iraqi refugee, Salwan Momika, 37, set fire to pages of the Koran last June in front of the Stockholm Grand Mosque on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Adha.
On July 20, he did it again by trampling and tearing up a copy of the holy book in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm. His actions had a significant impact in the Arab-Muslim world where they were widely denounced.
READ ALSO Burning of the Koran in Sweden and Denmark: do not give in to blackmail! Some 600 adherents to a jihadist ideology – the equivalent of S files in France – have been identified in Belgium and the security services have feared, since October 7, a contagion of Middle Eastern violence. Three pro-Palestinian demonstrations have already taken place in Belgium in recent days. The trial into the Islamist attacks in Brussels, which left 32 dead in March 2016, only just ended last month.
After long months of hearings and deliberations, eight defendants, including Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Abrini, were found guilty of terrorist assassinations and sentenced to sentences ranging from ten years in prison to life. Belgium did not imagine falling back into terrorist horror so quickly.
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