BRUSSELS (CNN) — The police raid of a Brussels apartment tied to last year’s Paris terror attacks turned up an ISIS flag, a Kalashnikov rifle and ammunition, but two suspects managed to escape after an intense, prolonged firefight, a spokesman for the Belgium’s federal prosecutor office said Wednesday.
Authorities killed one suspect in Tuesday’s raid — Belkhaid Mohammed, 35, an Algerian who had not been on authorities’ radar before, spokesman Eric Van der Sypt said in a statement.
He said that special forces “neutralized” Mohammed, who was found dead next to a rifle and a book on Salafism, a puritanical branch of Islam that dictates only the followers of the Prophet Mohammed practice the correct Islam. No explosives were found, Van der Sypt said.
An intense manhunt followed Tuesday’s operation in the southern Brussels neighborhood of Forest, which authorities connected to the investigation of the Paris terrorist attacks in November that killed 130 people.
One person was detained in Brussels, but it wasn’t immediately clear if there was any connection with Tuesday’s shootout.
In the aftermath, four police officers are recovering from slight injuries. Two have already been treated and released from an area hospital, according to Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon.
What happened
A team of four Belgian and two French police officers faced resistance from the start when they went to the Forest residence around 2:15 p.m. Tuesday.
“From the moment that the door of the flat was opened, at least two persons … opened fire toward them,” Van der Sypt said.
Three officers were hurt in the initial exchange of gunfire, and a fourth was wounded among the later reinforcements.
Van der Sypt said police conducted more house searches in the raid’s aftermath, though those didn’t appear to have yielded any breakthroughs.
Belgium a focus
It’s unclear what connection Tuesday’s raid has to the November 13 carnage in Paris. Belgium has been a focal point for investigators.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Two terrorist operatives phoned in orders from Brussels to those directly involved in the Paris attacks, according to a senior Belgian counterterrorism official.
These two had an even more integral role than Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the man long identified as the ringleader of the attacks, according to the official.
Fear of more attacks
Abaaoud was killed during a raid that collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building in Paris.
Yet others with Belgian connections and ties to the November attacks remain at large.
They include Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national who lived and spent time with Abaaoud in a Belgian prison. The trail for Abdeslam, one of the few alleged Paris attackers to escape alive, went cold in December, according to a senior European counterterrorism official.
French sources close to the investigation said Abdeslam was not the target of Tuesday’s raid. The sources said French police were part of that operation.
There are many reasons authorities investigating the Paris attacks are in Belgium. Many of those tied to the Paris massacre live in the country, and they’re believed to have met there before planning attacks.
There is concern more individuals from the same place may be ready to launch other attacks.
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