Adult, three minors arrested in Belgium over terror attack messages

From AFP via Al Arabiya and the Mail on Sunday

Police in Belgium have arrested an 18-year-old and three minors suspected of terror offences over messages they exchanged allegedly plotting a jihadist attack. . .  deemed “imminent enough to intervene,” a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office told AFP.

The four — three minors in their “late teens” and an adult man aged 18 — were arrested when police raided home addresses in the cities of Brussels, Ninove, Charleroi and Liege, the spokesman, Eric Van Der Sypt, said.

No weapons or explosives were found. Police took away mobile phones and laptops for analysis, he said, confirming reports from Belgian media RTBF and HLN.

The messages the four exchanged on the internet about the alleged planned attack were “worrying enough to intervene, to do house searches,” Van Der Sypt said.
“It’s not that they were planning something tomorrow, but still imminent enough to intervene,” he said. “They’re very flexible. If somebody gives them a weapon, for example, things can go very, very fast. So we don’t want to take any risk . . . From the moment that we think that we have to intervene, even if we have not too much [evidence] afterwards, we prefer intervening in time.”

Police were questioning the four suspects and an investigating judge was on Sunday or Monday to determine what would ensue, he said.

The relative youth of the suspects heightened authorities’ wariness.