A group of young jihadist suspects arrested in Belgium at the weekend were planning an imminent attack on a concert hall in the capital, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Police on Sunday detained three minors in their “late teens” and an 18-year-old man for what prosecutors said were messages plotting an attack deemed “imminent enough to intervene”.
“The initial investigation indicates that a Brussels concert hall was specifically and concretely targeted, with an action planned within a few weeks,” the prosecutor’s office said Monday.
A source close to the investigation told AFP the three minors in particular were targeting the Botanique cultural complex, one of the capital’s best-known sites.
The three were questioned by a judge in the Flemish town of Dendermonde.
The initial investigation indicates the adult suspect was planning a separate attack, and was in contact with one of the three minors.
He was separately brought before a Brussels anti-terrorism judge and charged with “participating in the activities of a terrorist group, and taking actions in preparation for an attack”.
The suspects were arrested in raids on home addresses in the cities of Brussels, Ninove, Charleroi and Liege.
No weapons or explosives were found. Police took away mobile phones and laptops for analysis.
Belgian authorities remain highly vigilant since the 2016 jihadist attacks by suicide bombers that killed more than 30 people in blasts at the Brussels airport and the city’s metro system.
And in October last year, a Tunisian man shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels before being shot and killed by police.
Sunday’s arrests stemmed from a police operation looking into people deemed potentially violent and with links to Islamic extremism.
The relative youth of the suspects heightened authorities’ wariness.
“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,” a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, Eric Van Der Sypt, told AFP on Sunday.
