Police in Belgium have arrested a 14-year-old Ukrainian boy over an alleged plot to assault a mosque in Brussels. The teenage suspect was described as holding excessive right-wing beliefs.
The boy was arrested on Thursday and has been charged with getting ready a terrorist assault, the general public prosecutor’s workplace within the Belgian capital mentioned in an announcement launched the identical day. The Ukrainian teen “was planning to commit an assault on a mosque on Friday 24 January, a day of prayer and a busy time in mosques,” in keeping with prosecutors.
Citing “confidential data,” police raided the boy’s dwelling at daybreak, seizing knives, laptop tools and selfmade Nazi iconography, the assertion mentioned.
{The teenager} lives in Molenbeek, a disadvantaged suburb of Brussels with a majority Muslim inhabitants. He allegedly deliberate to focus on the Annajah mosque within the neighborhood.
Over the past decade, Molenbeek has grow to be generally known as a hotbed of Islamist radicalization. Three perpetrators of the 2015 Paris terror assaults lived within the space, which has been a fertile recruitment floor for each Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS) and different jihadist and opposition teams preventing within the Syrian Civil Conflict.
Talking in parliament on Thursday, Belgian Justice Minister Paul Van Tigchelt mentioned that the suspect harbored excessive right-wing views, which he had been uncovered to on-line. “The radicalization course of of those younger individuals is growing way more rapidly than previously,” Van Tigchelt warned, in remarks carried by Belgian media.
Virtually a 3rd of suspects concerned in terrorism instances between 2022 and 2024 had been minors, in keeping with a report printed by Belgium’s State Safety Service earlier this month. Three quarters of those minors had been allegedly concerned in jihadist exercise, whereas 1 / 4 had been suspects in right-wing plots, the report acknowledged. The youngest suspect arrested on this interval was 13 years outdated.
”This can be a worrying enhance,” the minister added.
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