Two Swedes killed in Brussels shooting
Abdesalem L. was shot in a cafe in Schaerbeek
The terror suspect, has officially been identified as "Abdesalem L." The suspect is believed to be a 45-year-old Tunisian national, residing in irregularity in the Brussels municipality of Schaerbeek, who was radicalised and shared support for extremism online. In Tunisia, he was also know for his links to terrorism.
Brussels' terror level has been raised to 4 for the first time since the 2016. The rest of the country has been raised to level 3. Security at the Franco-Belgian border has been strengthened. Dutch authorities have also strengthened their border.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has asked Brussels residents to be "vigilant" as the suspect is still on the run. Security services, federal and local police, and ministers have gathered at the National Crisis Centre to coordinate the response to this attack, which is being described as a terrorist incident.
The EU Commission in Brussels has raised its alert level and will ask its staff to work from home on Tuesday. Car parks for the building will be closed to vehicles and EU schools will also be closed.
France steps up plans to deal with Islamic radicalisation
President Emmanuel Macron called for security services to be “intractable” on deporting radicalised foreigners, following the stabbing death of teacher Dominique Bernard in Arras, by Mohammed Mogouchkov, a 20-year-old who arrived in France in 2008 with his family from the Muslim-majority Russian region of Ingushetia.
Mogouchkov, who has Russian citizenship, cannot be legally deported, as he arrived in France before the age of 13. Mogouchkov was under surveillance for the last few weeks and had been stopped by police the day before the murder, but there was no proof that he would commit a crime that would have allowed him to be arrested.
There was no “failure of the intelligence services”. You cannot arrest everyone because they are in a radicalised family.
Intelligence services had a big dossier on Mogouchkov, but there was “not enough to arrest him, so we cannot talk about breaches of security”.
His father was deported in 2018 for radicalisation, and his older brother is serving a five-year prison term for advocating terrorism and having been involved in foiled attack on the Elysée palace in 2014.
According to a 2020 security memo from France’s DGSI intelligence agency, since Chechen-born Khamzat Azimov stabbed to death a young man and injured several others in Paris in 2018 and Abdoullakh Anzorov's beheading of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, six attacks and suspected attacks implicated “actors of Chechen origin in jihadists projects on the national territory.”
History of war and jihad
People from the Muslim-majority parts of the Caucuses have been under scrutiny in France for nearly twenty years, since they started arriving during and after the two Chechen independence wars, in 1994-1996 and 1999-2009.
Between 20,000 to 40,000 people from the North Caucuses live in France, but the DGSI report says they represented a disproportionate number of those who left to join the Islamic State armed group in Syria starting in 2012.
This came out of the Chechen independence movement, which shifted from being an opposition to Russian power “to a more universal dimension" of global jihad.
Despite it’s small demographic size in France, the North Caucasian community is overrepresented in the French jihadist contingent. Chechens who stayed in France are often represented in violent projects.
Comments (2)
Но действительно, что делать в таких случаях?
В наших советах они не нуждаются