Arrests in Brussels, Paris as Europe reels after attacks


One person was wounded and detained in a major police operation in the northern Brussels borough of Schaerbeek, Belgian public broadcaster RTBF quoted the local mayor as saying on Friday.Bernard Clerfayt said the person was linked to the bomb attacks in Brussels and to a foiled plot this week near Paris. Heavily armed police and military with trucks cordoned off an area around a major intersection and three blasts were heard, which Clerfayt said were controlled explosions.Broadcaster RTL quoted a witness as saying police approached a person at a bus stop and asked the person to remove a jacket. "No doubt to check if the person had an explosives belt strapped on," the witness told RTL. The witness said it was not clear if the person had been wounded, but was lying on the ground and talking to the police.In addition to the one in Brussels, seven terror suspects were in custody in Belgium and France yesterday, as under-fire European authorities stepped up the fight against extremist networks following the triple bombing in Brussels claimed by DAESH.In the Paris suburbs, police arrested a man accused of plotting an attack in France that was "in the advanced stages" and found a small cache of explosives.In Brussels, families faced an agonizing wait after forensic experts warned it could take weeks to identify fatalities.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks with the Belgian authorities who have faced heavy criticism over how the Brussels attackers, at least three of whom were known to authorities, slipped through the net. The man arrested in Paris was a French national who "belongs to a terrorist network that sought to strike our country," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said late Thursday, hailing the "major arrest."Police evacuated an apartment block in the rundown northern suburb of Argenteuil where a small quantity of explosives was found. While Cazeneuve said no link to the Paris or Brussels attacks had emerged, police sources said Friday that the suspect had in July been found guilty in absentia, alongside Paris ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, of being part of a group planning to go to Syria.Named by police sources as Reda K., Cazeneuve said the suspect had been under surveillance "for several weeks" and his arrest was the result of "close and constant cooperation between European services."European authorities are under huge pressure to better coordinate the tracking of homegrown extremists and those returning from Syria, as evidence grows of a thriving extremist network straddling France and Belgium.The Brussels attacks also came four days after Salah Abdeslam, the prime suspect in the Paris attacks who had been on the run for four months, was arrested in a dramatic raid in the city just around the corner from his family home.A wide manhunt is ongoing for a third attacker at Brussels airport whose bomb did not go off, a man wearing a hat seen on security footage. Police are also hunting a man with a large bag captured on CCTV talking to Khalid el-Bakraoui at Maalbeek station, who then did not get on to the train with the bomber, police sources told Agence France-Presse (AFP).A series of raids in the capital Thursday yielded six arrests, including three people detained "outside the door of the federal prosecutor's office," a spokesman for the prosecution service said. It was unknown whether the arrests included either of the key suspects sought over the worst attacks in the country's history.Belgium has lowered its terror alert to the second-highest level for the first time since the attacks, but the police and military presence on the streets of the capital remains high. People of around 40 nationalities were killed or wounded in the attack, testament to the cosmopolitan nature of Europe's symbolic capital.Very few of the dead have been formally identified. Forensic experts, working with teeth, fingerprints and DNA, are sometimes relying just on tiny fragments of bodies and warn that the process could take weeks.Tales of lucky escapes from the attacks have been emerging, along with cases of tragic ill fortune of people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.Among only three fatalities formally named was Peruvian Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz, 37. Her husband Christophe Delcambe and their three-year-old twin daughters only survived because the girls had run off and their father had chased after them. Harrowing new footage of the moments after the airport attack has emerged on Belgian television, showing a lone baby left crying in the wreckage next to the lifeless body of a woman.