Belgian soldiers have shot a man suspected of being a would-be suicide bomber at Brussels Central Station, officials say.<\/p>\n
He was shot after reportedly setting off a small explosion and no-one else is believed to have been injured.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors later said the man had died. They are treating the incident as a terrorist attack.<\/p>\n
In March 2016, 32 people were killed in attacks on Brussels claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group.<\/p>\n
According to Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique, quoting prosecutors, the man who was shot was wearing a rucksack and a bomb belt.<\/p>\n
He detonated a device when he attracted the attention of soldiers in the station, the paper says.<\/p>\n
Nicolas Van Herrewegen, a railway sorting agent, said he had gone down to the station’s mezzanine level when he heard someone shouting.<\/p>\n
“Then he cried ‘Allahu Akbar’ and he blew up a wheeled suitcase,” he told AFP news agency.<\/p>\n
“I was behind a wall when it exploded. I went down and alerted my colleagues to evacuate everyone. He [the suspect] was still around but after that we didn’t see him.”<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t exactly a big explosion but the impact was pretty big,” he added. “People were running away.”<\/p>\n
Mr Van Herrewegen described the suspect as well-built and tanned with short hair, wearing a white shirt and jeans.<\/p>\n
“I saw that he had something on him because I could see wires emerging, so it may have been a suicide vest,” he said.<\/p>\n
Lawyer Remy Bonnaffe, 23, was waiting for a train and took a photograph of flames seconds after the explosion.<\/p>\n
He told Reuters news agency that people close to the explosion appeared unhurt and he saw no obvious damage to nearby walls.<\/p>\n
“I’m happy that no-one was injured and that this was basically a failed attempt,” he said.<\/p>\n
Arash Aazami arrived at the station just after the explosion. He told the BBC: “As we entered into the station, we were evacuated loudly by some security personnel.<\/p>\n
“Looked around, saw people running in the streets, trying to seek refuge and decided to do the same ourselves.”<\/p>\n
As the station and Grand Place were evacuated, businesses and restaurants were ordered to close and draw down their shutters, RTL radio reports.<\/p>\n
Metro lines running through the station were also briefly suspended on orders of the police, according to the radio.<\/p>\n
On 22 March of last year, three suicide bombers mounted twin attacks on the city’s Zaventem airport and Maelbeek underground station.<\/p>\n
The same Brussels-based IS cell was also behind the gun and bomb attacks in Paris in November 2015, that killed 130 people.<\/p>\n
The French capital was jolted again on Monday when a man with an Islamist background died after ramming his car into a police van on the Avenue des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9e.<\/p>\n
London has also been on edge since a van was driven into Muslim worshippers outside a mosque on Sunday night, with one man dying and nine people injured. It followed IS-claimed attacks on London’s Borough Market in June and a pop concert in Manchester in May that together left some 30 people dead and more than 100 injured.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Belgian soldiers have shot a man suspected of being a would-be suicide bomber at Brussels Central Station, officials say. He was shot after reportedly setting off a small explosion and no-one else is believed to have been injured. Prosecutors later said the man had died. They are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[8440,8441],"class_list":["post-330241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","tag-brussels-attack","tag-suicide-bomber"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}