New Europe:
PUBLISHED 15:23 FEBRUARY 17, 2016UPDATED 15:41 FEBRUARY 17, 2016
Paris terrorists were targeting Belgian nuclear plants
By Dan Alexe
Contributing Editor, New Europe
What's This?According to the Belgian popular newspaper La Dernière
Heure, security has been enhanced around Belgian nuclear plants, after
investigators acquired the conviction that the Belgian and French
terrorists of North African extraction who killed 130 people and left
350 wounded in Paris in November last year were initially planning to
attack nuclear plants in Belgium.
In one of the hide-outs in Brussels, investigators have found more than
ten hours of video footage of the house of the chief of the Belgian
nuclear researches in Flanders. The official had been tracked and
followed for a long time by the terrorists who finally committed the
massacres in Paris, which already constitutes a serious breach in
security and a serious embarrassment for the Belgian security services.
Belgium has seven nuclear reactors generating about half of its
electricity. The state of the Belgian nuclear plants, especially the
faltering Doel and Tihange reactors, in Wallonia, is regularly
denounced by Belgium’s neighbours France and Germany.
A nuclear reactor at Tihange power station was turned off on 18
December 2015 evening due to a fire in the plant. There were loud
protests in Germany’s western border region of Aachen in December
against the state of Belgium’s nuclear plants across the border.
Belgium intends to keep the reactors in function until the phasing out
of its nuclear sector by 2025.
The last time the eventuality of terrorists resorting to a nuclear
attack through proxy was invoked was in 2003, when the Belgian-Tunisian
former professional footballer Nizar Trabelsi was sentenced to 10
years’ imprisonment for plotting to attack the American airbase of
Kleine Brogel in Flanders, Belgium, where nuclear missiles are known to
be stored. In October 2013, after having fully served his sentence,
Trabelsi was extradited to the United States, but for a long time at
the end of 2007 and the start of 2008, there was maximum alert in
Brussels when authorities intercepted a plot to free Trabelsi from jail.
On Tuesday 16 February, Belgian police raided homes in Brussels on
Tuesday and detained 10 people linked to a recruiting network for the
Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
Belgium has one of the highest per capita rates of participation in militant groups such as Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
According to figures from the International Centre for the Study of
Radicalisation, Belgium has supplied 40 fighters per million
inhabitants to fighting in Syria and Iraq – more than any other
European country. Denmark comes a distant second place, with 27
fighters per million.
More than one quarter of the population of Brussels, the “EU’s
capital”, is Muslim, mostly first and second generation Moroccans and
Turks.
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