– Threat to nuclear plants –
Belgium’s ageing nuclear power plants have also come under scrutiny as a possible terror risk, with the EU’s anti-terror chief Gilles de Kerchove telling La Libre Belgique newspaper they face the threat of a terrorist cyber-attack over the next five years.
According to reports, a security guard at a Belgian nuclear power plant was murdered Thursday and his access badge stolen. Prosecutors denied any terror link, Belga news agency reported, and said that in fact the man worked at a medical research facility that used radioactive isotopes.
These reports follow the discovery by investigators last year of surveillance footage of a nuclear plant official in the flat of a suspect linked to the Brussels and Paris attacks.
European authorities are under huge pressure to better coordinate the tracking of homegrown extremists and fighters returning from Syria.
The Belgian government has admitted “errors” and two ministers offered to resign after Turkey said it had arrested and deported Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who blew himself up in the airport attack.
Ibrahim and his brother Khalid, the suicide bomber in the metro attack, were also on a US counter-terrorism watch list, CNN reported.
Belgian prosecutors have said that the DNA of second airport bomber Najim Laachraoui was found on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth at the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people were killed during November’s Paris attacks, and on a bomb at the Stade de France stadium.
Harrowing stories continued to emerge from survivors of the attacks, in which people of around 40 nationalities were killed or wounded.
Briton David Dixon, 51, who lived in Brussels, texted his aunt after the airport blasts to say he was safe, but happened to be on the metro system and died when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Maalbeek station near Brussels’ EU quarter, British media said.
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