Belgium police kill two in anti-terror raid shootout

Belgian police killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch “terrorist attacks on a grand scale”.

Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, the incident fuelled fears across Europe of young Muslims returning radicalised from Syria. But the Belgian probe had been under way before the 7 January attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and officials saw no obvious link between the two.

A third man was detained in the eastern city of Verviers, where police commandos ran into a hail of gunfire after trying to gain entry to an apartment above a town centre bakery.

All three were citizens of Belgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.

Other raids on the homes of men returned from the civil war there were conducted across the country, prosecutors said, adding that they were suspected of planning attacks on Belgian police stations.