Fourteen Islamist extremists were being held Friday on suspicion of planning to use explosives to free an Al Qaeda sympathizer from prison, the Belgian Interior Ministry and federal prosecutor said.

The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said in a statement, “Other acts of violence are not excluded.” And the authorities put the capital, Brussels, on a high state of alert, increasing security at main train stations, the airport, and major public places where people were gathering to do their Christmas shopping.

The arrests came after the police raided 15 locations, most of them in Brussels, seizing explosives and arms. Those detained were suspected of planning to try to break into a prison to free Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian former pro soccer player who was arrested days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, in connection with a plot to drive a car bomb into an American air base in northeast Belgium. Mr. Trabelsi was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.

The authorities did not offer any evidence or details about their suspicions, or name the prison where Mr. Trabelsi was being held. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Peter Mertens, said he was “moved regularly.”

Europe is already on a state of alert because of the Christmas holidays, and the Algerian bombings last week which killed dozens in the capital, Algiers. France and Belgium share concerns of terrorist threats from north Africans. France has large Algerian and Moroccan populations, while Belgium’s north African population is largely Moroccan.

On Thursday, French police said they were holding five men believed to be members of a logistical support cell for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Agence France-Presse reported. That group is a longstanding terrorist network, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, that changed its name after affiliating with Osama bin Laden’s network this year.

The five men were part of a group of eight people — six French nationals, an Algerian and a Tunisian — who were detained early Tuesday in Paris, its outlying districts and in the Rouen region of northwest France, AFP said, although three men were released on Wednesday.

The arrest of the eight was described by Le Figaro newspaper as “one of the biggest in 2007”, and capped months of investigation, AFP reported.

In November 2005, the Belgian police arrested 14 suspects in a series of raids aimed at breaking a terrorist network that the authorities said was involved in attacks on American targets in Iraq, including a suicide bombing by a Belgian woman in Baghdad in 2005. At the time, the Belgian police said the group was recruiting volunteers across Europe to assist Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi terrorist network that is a driving force in the Iraq insurgency.

Those arrests — in the cities of Charleroi, Antwerp and Riemst, as well as in Brussels — involved suspects of Belgian, Tunisian and Moroccan origin, the police said at the time.

At the time, terrorist cells were believed to be using Belgium as a recruiting ground and as an easy source of fake passports and other documents.

source: NY times

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