Attacker kills three in Liege, dies after
gunbattle with police
Re
A man killed two policewomen and a
bystander in the Belgian city of Liege on
Tuesday before being shot dead in a
gunbattle at a school in what prosecutors are
treating as a terrorist attack.
The man was named by public broadcaster
RTBF as a 36-year-old petty criminal who had
been let out on day-release from a local prison
on Monday. It said investigators were looking
into whether he had converted to Islam and
been radicalised in jail.
A public prosecutor told a news conference
that the man attacked the policewomen from
behind with a knife, described as a box-cutter
by RTBF, around 10:30 a.m. (0830 GMT) on a
boulevard in the centre of Belgium's third city,
near the German border.
After stabbing the officers, prosecutor Philippe
Dulieu said, the man seized one of their
handguns and shot both women dead before
walking down the street and shooting dead a
22-year-old man who was sitting in the
passenger seat of a parked car.
The man then made his way into a high school
where he took a woman employee hostage,
triggering a major intervention by armed
police. Pupils were moved to safety as a
gunbattle broke out that sent people in the
street racing for cover. Several police were
wounded before the attacker was finally killed.
"The event is classed as a terrorist incident,"
Dulieu said.
The national crisis centre, on high alert since
past attacks by Islamic State in Paris and
Brussels in the past three years, said it was
monitoring events but had not raised its alert
level - an indication they do not expect related
follow-up attacks.
La Libre Belgique newspaper quoted a police
source as saying the gunman shouted "Allahu
Akbar" -- God is greatest in Arabic.
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Images posted on social media showed
elements of the drama:
Apparently the two police officers, arms bare
on what was a hot sunny morning, wearing
protective vests and lying in pools of blood a
couple of metres apart outside a cafe; the
gunman, dressed in black, waving a pistol in
each hand, standing in the middle of the road;
and finally the assailant emerging from a
building onto the street, firing on police, who
gun him down.
Prime Minister Charles Michel, expressing his
condolences to the families of the victims,
said it was too early to say what had caused
the incident. King Philippe visited Liege, the
biggest city in Belgium's French-speaking
Wallonia region.
An industrial powerhouse on the Meuse river,
it was the scene of a mass shooting in 2011,
when a man killed four people and wounded
over 100 others before turning his gun on
himself.
A Brussels-based Islamic State cell was
involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed
130 people and on Brussels in 2016 in which
32 died. The Brussels IS cell had links to
militants in Verviers, another industrial town
close to Liege, where in early 2015 police
raided a safe house and killed two men who
had returned from fighting with radical
Islamists in Syria.
European authorities are deeply concerned
about the risks of petty criminals, including
those not from Muslim backgrounds, being
inspired to Islamist violence while
incarcerated.
by: bdnews24