Suspected Plan to Strike Belgian Prime Minister Thwarted
Belgian police have arrested three individuals allegedly involved in plotting an strike on the government's PM, Bart de Wever.
Federal prosecutors described the alleged scheme as a terrorist act motivated by jihadist ideology targeting the prime minister and other government officials.
During raids conducted in Deurne, Antwerp, near the PM's private residence, authorities discovered a potential IED and evidence that the suspects were intending to employ a unmanned aerial vehicle.
While the intended targets of the strike were not disclosed by name by the legal authorities, Second-in-command Maxime Prevot revealed that the prime minister was among them.
"Reports of a planned strike directed toward Premier Bart de Wever is profoundly disturbing," Prevot declared in a post on X on the investigation day.
"It highlights that we are dealing with a very real extremist danger and that we have to keep watchful," he added.
The three people taken into custody on suspicion of attempted terrorist murder and engagement in the operations of a terrorist group all live in Antwerp, per the legal authorities. They were had birth years in three different years between 2001 and 2007.
By Thursday evening, one person was let go, while the other suspects were under interrogation and expected to face a judge on the next day.
Legal authorities said that the accused were arrested after a magistrate ordered searches of their homes in the location by officials assisted by bomb detection canines.
It was during these searches that they found a item which "bore strong resemblances to an improvised explosive device", federal prosecutor Ann Fransen announced at a media briefing on that day.
Searches also found a container of metal spheres and a 3D printer, with "indications that they intended to use a drone to attach a payload", she noted.
Fransen said that there had been 80 terrorism investigations initiated in Belgium in the current year - more than the total number of investigations in the previous year.
In April, five suspects were convicted for a scheme last year to strike the prime minister while he was serving as the city's chief executive.
