‘Terrorist’ kills three in Belgium

A man killed two policewomen and a bystander in the Belgian city of Liege yesterday before being killed in a gun battle at a school in what is being treated as a terrorist attack.

The man was named by public broadcaster RTBF as a petty criminal, 36, who had been let out on day-release from prison on Monday.

Investigators were looking into whether he had converted to Islam and had been radicalised in prison.

A prosecutor said the man set upon the policewomen from behind with a knife, described as a box-cutter by RTBF, on a boulevard in the centre of Belgium’s third city, near the German border.

Having stabbed them, prosecutor Philippe Dulieu said, the man then seized one of their handguns and shot both women dead before walking down the street and shooting dead a man, 22, who was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car.

The man then made his way into a high school where he took a woman employee hostage, triggering a major intervention by armed police. Pupils were moved to safety as a gun battle broke out that sent people in the street racing for cover. Several police were wounded before the attacker was finally killed.
“The event is classed as a terrorist incident,” Dulieu said.

The national crisis centre, on high alert since past attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in the past three years, said it had not raised its alert level.

Newspaper La Libre Belgique quoted a police source as saying the gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “God is greatest” in Arabic.

Prime Minister Charles Michel, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims, said it was too early to say what had caused the incident.

King Philippe visited Liege, the biggest city in Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia region.

An industrial powerhouse on the River Meuse, it was the scene of a mass shooting in 2011, when a man killed four people and wounded more than 100 others before turning his gun on himself.

A Brussels-based Islamic State cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and on Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. – Reuters