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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