Brussels attacks: Belgian police arrest six suspects

Armed police patrolled the streets in Schaerbeek after the arrests

 

Belgian police have arrested six people in Brussels as a major investigation continues into attacks that claimed 31 lives in the city on Tuesday.

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The arrests were made in the Schaerbeek district. There is no word yet on the identities of the suspects or their possible connection to the attacks.
Separately, in France, a suspect who was plotting an attack has been arrested near Paris.
The Brussels bombings have been linked to last November's Paris attacks.
So-called Islamic State (IS) has claimed the attacks in both Paris and Brussels.
The arrests in Schaerbeek were made late on Thursday, and followed house-to-house searches in the area.
Residents said they heard explosions during the police raids but the cause was unclear.
Belgian media reports on Friday suggest a seventh arrest was made in the Forest district of Brussels.
Also on Thursday evening, French police launched an anti-terrorism operation in Argenteuil, north-west of Paris, following the arrest hours earlier of a man suspected of planning an attack.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the suspected militant, a French national, was in an "advanced stage" of a plot, adding that no connection had been made to either the Brussels or the Paris attacks.
However, French media quote police sources as saying the suspect, named as Reda Kriket, was convicted in his absence by a Brussels court last year for recruiting IS members to go to Syria.
He was convicted along with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, considered the main organiser of the Paris attacks and killed in a police raid in Paris days later.
Last November, 130 people died after militants opened fire and detonated bombs in a number of locations in the French capital.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry has meanwhile arrived in Belgium for talks on combating terrorism.

Masked police secured the entrance to a building in Schaerbeek

 

 

Brahim el-Bakraoui was arrested in Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border

 

Brahim el-Bakraoui is one of three men - pictured in the middle on a CCTV image of them - who carried out the bombings at Zaventem airport that killed 11 people.

Unconfirmed reports say another of the Brussels airport attackers was the wanted jihadist Najim Laachraoui, whose DNA was found on explosives linked to the attacks in Paris.
The third suspected airport attacker has not yet been identified and is on the run.
Bakraoui's brother, Khalid, struck at Maelbeek metro station, where 20 people died.
There are reports of a second suspect being sought for that attack. One source told AFP news agency that a man with a large bag had been seen beside Khalid el-Bakraoui on surveillance footage at the metro station.
Meanwhile, the Flemish-language public broadcaster VRT reported that investigators were working on the assumption that the cell had been planning a far bigger attack, involving Paris-style shootings as well as suicide bombings.