If “good news” and terrorism are ever compatible in a sentence together, it’s only for situations such as this. According to Newsweek, Belgian police have arrested seven people they believe to be suspects in the recent terrorist attacks that took place in Brussels.
The coordinated suicide attack, which occurred on Tuesday and left 31 people dead, was just the most recent in what’s become all too familiar in recent years. In total, three separate attacks took place that day at the country’s international airport and one of its popular metro stations.
Security experts and government officials are still trying to determine exactly how they were able to pull off the plot in the face of already heightened security. Before the attacks occurred, there had already been clues that an impending attack could be coming thanks in part to information gathered from Salah Abdeslam, the lone surviving attacker from the Paris terrorist attacks last summer.
On Thursday, a spokesman for the office of Eric Van der Sypt told the AFP news agency that three of the suspects were arrested “outside the door of the federal prosecutor’s office” in Brussels. Two were arrested in other areas of the city, one in a place called Jette, which is on Brussels’ outskirts, and the seventh man was technically arrested early Friday morning in the Forest district of the city.
“It will be decided tomorrow if an arrest warrant (charges) are brought against these people,” the spokesman went on to say.
In the United States, approximately 52% of the male population will be arrested at least once in their lifetimes. It’s unclear the sex of all the suspects in question, but they are believed to be men.
The Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir also reported on Thursday that Jan Jambon, Belgian’s Interior Minister, and Justice Minister Koen Geens offered the resignations for failing to prevent the attacks. One of the suspects now in custody had actually been deported from Turkey for links to Islamic extremism, but Belgium failed to take any action when he came back into the country.