BRUSSELS: Belgium’s government is ready to call in troops to increase security after a huge police swoop against a suspected militant cell that was planning attacks on police, Prime Minis­ter Charles Michel said on Friday.

“The army will be available to reinforce our levels of security,” Mr Michel said after a special cabinet meeting, which discussed other steps such as isolating Islamist prisoners in special sections in jails.

The government raised the threat alert to three on a scale of four on Thursday, providing the basis for it to use the military, Interior Minister Jan Jambon said. “A company of 150 men stands ready for deployment.”

Govt raises level of threat alert

Defence Minister Steven Vandeput said the men could deploy very quickly and would remain in place for “as long as the government believes it is necessary”.

This would be the first time the army has been called on to bolster security on Belgium’s streets since attacks in the 1980s by extreme leftist groups.

Belgian police arrested 13 people during a dozen raids overnight, smashing plot to kill police officers “in public roads and in police stations”, prosecutors said on Friday. Two suspects were shot dead during a gunbattle after one of the police raids in the eastern town of Verviers on Thursday night.

“The group was on the verge of carrying out terrorist attacks to kill police officers in public roads and in police stations,” spokesman Eric Van der Sijpt told a news conference.

Police found Kalashnikov assault rifles, explosives, ammunition and communications equipment — along with police uniforms that could have been used for the plot, he said. Belgium would also seek the extradition of two Belgian suspects from France, although there was no link seen with last week’s Paris attacks, prosecutors told a news conference.

“I can confirm that we started this investigation before the attacks in Paris,” Van der Sijpt said. The “important arrests” meant that “not only a terror cell but also their support network” had been dismantled, he added.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2015

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