At least one person is on the run and at least one more is barricaded inside a Brussels building where gunshots rang out Tuesday during a raid tied to last year’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, Belgian intelligence sources told CNN.
Police had gone to southern Brussels on Tuesday afternoon believing the apartment they were searching was empty, only to have people inside begin shooting at them, according to one senior Belgian counterrorism official. French police were among the law enforcement agencies involved, French sources close to the investigation said.
A man in Forest, the southern Brussels district where the raid occurred, heard about 30 shots — including some from a suspect firing what appeared to be a rifle at police.
“I ended up in the middle of terror here in Brussels,” the witness said.
Three police officers suffered slight injuries in two different shootouts in the same building in the Belgian capital, said Marie Verdete, a spokeswoman for police in south Brussels.
The situation remained fluid early Tuesday evening along Rue du Dries, a small and typically calm road, according to Verdete.
Belgium a focus after Paris attacks
It’s not known what connection, specifically, Tuesday’s raid has to the November 13, 2015, carnage in Paris — though it’s no mystery Belgium has been a focal point for investigators since then.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings and torrents of gunfire that rattled through restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall, leaving at least 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.
Still, while ISIS itself may be most established in Syria and Iraq, European investigators focused intently on Belgium — and especially its capital, Brussels — on the heels of that attack.
Earlier this year, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN that two terrorist operatives phoned in orders from Brussels to those directly involved in the Paris attacks.
As such, these two had an even more integral role than Abdelhamid Abaaoud — the man long identified as the attacks’ ringleader — according to the official.
Abdeslam not the target of latest raid, sources say
Abaaoud himself was killed during a dramatic raid that shook a Paris neighborhood and collapsed an entire floor of an apartment building.
Yet many others with Belgian connections and ties to the November 13 attacks are still at large.
They include Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian-born French national who lived and spent time together 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.
While he remains very much a wanted man, French sources close to the investigation said Abdeslam was not the target of Tuesday’s raid.
That said, there are many reason authorities investigating the Paris attacks would be in Belgium. Not only did many of those tied to the November Paris attacks live in that small European nation, they’re believed to have met there before lashing out.
One fear is that there may be more individuals from the same place ready to launch more attacks.
Last month, for instance, investigators conducting a search in connection to what happened in Paris found about 10 hours of video surveillance of a senior Belgian nuclear official, Belgian prosecutor’s office spokesman Thierry Werts said. It’s unclear if that footage was from before or after the November attacks.
