[Breaking news update at 4:57 a.m.]
Turkish authorities arrested three people with suspected ties to ISIS in connection with last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency reported Saturday.
[Previous story posted at 4:05 a.m.]
This will not be a normal Saturday in Brussels. The Belgian capital is on the country’s highest terrorism alert level.
The warning, from the Crisis Centre of the Belgian Interior Ministry, cites “a serious and imminent threat that requires taking specific security measures as well as specific recommendations for the population.”
It advises the public to avoid places where large groups gather — such as concerts, sporting events, airports and train stations — and comply with security checks.
The city’s underground metro service will not be running Saturday and other public transit will be operating on a limited schedule, the ministry said.
Outside of Brussels, the rest of the nation will maintain its current terrorism level.
Why now?
If people take the alert seriously, Brussels will be “shut down tomorrow,” CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.
“It suggests they have something specific and credible at the intelligence front pointing them in the direction that there may be a terrorist plot in the works,” he said. “It also suggests they don’t have a handle on it, that they don’t know where these plotters are or where they’re coming from.”
The increase in the alert level for Brussels comes as authorities investigating last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris conduct raids in Belgium. They are working to identify and take down the network of terrorists behind the carnage.
The U.S. State Department advised Americans there to be cautious.
The man they’re looking for
Salah Abdeslam, 26, is the subject of an international search warrant. He was last seen driving toward the Belgian border, when police stopped and questioned him a few hours after the attacks, not knowing that he was allegedly involved. His whereabouts are unknown.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.
Abdeslam is one of two brothers allegedly involved in last week’s coordinated attacks at the Bataclan concert hall, outside the French national soccer stadium and at restaurants in Paris. Although he’ is a French national, he was born in Belgium.
Fertile ground
That is one of several connections between the Paris attacks and Belgium, a country seen as fertile ground for jihadist recruiters. Members of a suspected terrorist cell waged a deadly gun battle in January with police in Belgium.
And Belgium is where three Americans in August overpowered a radical Islamist gunman on a Paris-bound train.
The country was also home to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is suspected of having been the ringleader of the attacks in Paris. Abaaoud was killed during a raid that shook the Saint-Denis neighborhood outside Paris and collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Abaaoud “played a decisive role” in the Paris attacks and played a part in four of six terrorist attacks foiled since spring, with one alleged jihadist claiming Abaaoud had trained him personally.
Abaaoud was once allegedly involved in gangs in Molenbeek. Because of that impoverished Brussels suburb’s links to terrorist plots, Belgian special operations forces conducted raids there Monday.
On Thursday, Belgian authorities detained nine people in raids across the country, the federal prosecutor’s office said. Seven of them were questioned after six raids around Brussels related to Bilal Hadfi, one of the men who blew himself up outside the Stade de France.
France’s state of emergency
On Friday, the French Parliament extended the country’s state of emergency by three months, following last week’s terror attacks that left 130 people dead.
France’s constitutional council still has to review the bill, but no problems are expected..
Authorities had been using the state of emergency declared by President Francois Hollande to carry out a widespread clampdown on potential terrorist threats, detaining dozens of people, putting more than 100 others under house arrest and seizing an array of weapons.
France has about 10,000 military personnel deployed across the country in addition to 100,000 police officers and gendarmes, plus 5,500 customs officials, according to Prime Minister Manuel Valls.
Since the attacks last Friday, 164 people considered dangerous have been placed under house arrest, Valls said.
Woman didn’t kill herself
Also, the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that Hasna Ait Boulahcen, the woman found dead after the police raid in Saint-Denis, did not blow herself up as previously thought.
Instead, a man wearing a suicide device was the one that detonated, the prosecutor’s office told CNN.
Boulahcen, 26, was a relative of Abaaoud, official sources in France told CNN.
Friends of her family in their hometown of Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the northeastern outskirts of Paris, said she had lived there until recently. Residents of the area told CNN that authorities had taken her mother and brother into custody.
The Paris prosecutor’s office told CNN that police were searching the mother’s home.
France wants wider anti-ISIS coalition
On Friday, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution offered by France that is intended to gather international support for counterterrorism efforts, specifically aimed at ISIS.
The resolution calls on member states to take all necessary measures in compliance with international law to “redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically” by ISIS and urges states to “intensify their efforts to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Iraq and Syria.”
Hollande said he would appeal to world leaders to form a wider coalition to go after ISIS, including in meetings next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.