The assailant had visited the same morning in a police station holding inconsistent remarks and demanding psychiatric help, what a magistrate had refused.
by Jean-Pierre Stroobants (Brussels, correspondent)
A police inspector was killed and another seriously injured during a knife attack Thursday, November 10, in Schaerbeek, one of the nineteen municipalities that make up the Brussels region. The author of the facts, Yassine M., a 32 -year -old Belgian man of Belgian nationality, a former detainee who was stuck as radicalized, was injured and arrested by the agent of another patrol arrived quickly on the scene.
Transported to the hospital, the first police officer assaulted, aged 29, did not survive. Stepped stabs had been carried by the throat. His 23 -year -old colleague was operated overnight and his days were no longer in danger on Friday.
It was around 7 p.m. Thursday, rue d’Aerschot, along the North Station, where prostitution and traffic are concentrated in all kinds. Like every evening in this reputed “hot” area of the Belgian capital, a police presence was assured. Arrested at a red light, the driver of a police car and his colleague were attacked by a man armed with a knife who shouted “Allah Akbar”. He then tried to flee. Pursued, he was injured in the legs and belly. Indicted for assassination in a terrorist context and attempted assassination, it will be heard “as soon as its state allows it,” said judicial authorities on Friday.
radicalized in prison
The federal prosecutor’s office, notably responsible for terrorism files, and the Brussels prosecutor’s office held, in the morning of Friday, a brief press conference which came down to reading a press release relating the facts. They nevertheless aroused many questions.
The magistrates indicated that the assailant of the police had gone the same morning to a police station, in Evere. He would have made remarks qualified as “inconsistent”, expressed his “hatred” of the police but also claimed psychiatric aid. A patrol then accompanied him to a city hospital and awaited the confirmation of his care. Solicited by the police, a magistrate, however, refused to launch a procedure for observing the individual on the grounds that the legal criteria were not met, Yassine voluntarily claiming care. The hospital has therefore authorized its release.
Other questions relate to the surveillance of which the author of the attacks should have been the subject more generally. Incarcerated in a series of establishments from 2013 to 2019, he radicalized during his periods of detention, which earned him a file on the “Deradex” list of prisoners of radical movement. Placed in a special wing of ittre prison, in Walloon Brabant, he attacked a goalkeeper. He then challenged his transfer to Lantin prison, near Liège, but the Council of State estimated, in 2017, that he had “extremist motivations” and wanted to “share his ideology with other detainees”.
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