BRUSSELS, Dec 12: Belgian authorities on Friday charged six suspected Al Qaeda-linked extremists with membership in a terrorist group, including a woman whose husband was involved in the assassination of Afghanistan’s top anti-Taliban warlord shortly before the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

The six, picked up in an anti-terror sweep on Thursday, constituted the hard core of a terrorist group and included one militant who allegedly was plotting a suicide attack, spokeswoman Lieve Pellens of the federal prosecutor’s office said on Friday.

Police carried out the raids hours before the start of a European Union summit of 27 government leaders in the Belgian capital.

Eight other suspects had been picked up Thursday but a judge decided that there was insufficient evidence to hold them, Pellens said.

All suspects under arrest are Belgian, and include Moroccan-born Internet writer Malika El Aroud, whose first husband died in the 2001 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud.

El Aroud writes online in French under the name of Oum Obeyda. Most of the other suspects are in their 20s or early 30s and only one of those was known from other terror investigations, Pellens said.—AP