16 arrested in Belgium terror raids

After a dramatic security sweep late Sunday marked by the deployment of soldiers in the historic centre of the Belgian capital, the authorities here announced early Monday that 16 people had been arrested in a joint police and military operation to try to head off what the prime minister earlier described as a "serious and imminent" threat of a Paris-style terrorist assault.

Belgian security forces conducted 19 raids in the Brussels region on Sunday and three in the southern town of Charleroi, Eric Van der Sijpt, a magistrate and spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office, said at a late-night news conference. Backed by heavily armed soldiers, the police also sealed off at least two areas of central Brussels, including streets around the city's medieval central square, the Grand Place, a major tourist attraction.

But the main target of the clampdown, Salah Abdeslam, suspected to be one of the gunmen in the November 13 Paris attacks, was not among those arrested, Van der Sijpt said. The raids also uncovered no weapons or explosives, he added.

The Belgian news media reported Sunday that Abdeslam, a resident of the Brussels borough of Molenbeek whose brother was a suicide bomber in Paris, had been seen in the eastern city of Liege but then vanished again. Van der Sijpt declined to take questions on that or other aspects of the Belgian investigation into the links between the Paris attacks and Belgium.

He said several shots were fired by the police in Molenbeek late Sunday when, during a raid on a snack bar, a car drove toward officers. One person was wounded, he added.

Sunday's raids and show of force in the centre of Brussels escalated what had been mostly low-key precautions into a highly visible and often jittery military-style operation in a city usually associated with the somnolent activity of the European Union.

The operation, the biggest in the Belgian capital since the Paris attack, began shortly after a government meeting on the crisis and a decision to maintain for a second day the highest possible alert level in Brussels.

"We fear an attack similar to the one in Paris," Prime Minister Charles Michel said Sunday at a news conference. "A number of individuals could launch an attack on several locations in Brussels simultaneously." He spoke amid a growing mood of crisis as the authorities extended the hunt for Abdeslam, believed to be the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that attacked Paris, and for a widening number of suspects in Belgium linked to it.

Police officers and soldiers in camouflage blocked roads around the central headquarters of the Brussels police, near the Grand Place, and around the offices of the federal police.

©2015 The New York Times News Service