There are many examples of the back-and-forth between Belgium and France when it comes to terror.
Another came Saturday.
The Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office announced that investigators, who had been looking into last month’s arrest of a man allegedly plotting an attack in France, have detained and charged a 33-year-old man for being part of a terror group.
It’s not clear what exactly this man allegedly did, or even who he is. He’s identified only as a Belgian national with the initials Y.A. in the prosecutor’s news release.
His case is connected with that of Reda Kriket, a 32-year-old French citizen indicted on charges of criminal conspiracy in order to commit a terrorism act, possession of false documents, weapons possession and manufacturing of explosives.
French police arrested Kriket on March 24 in Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris, then raided an apartment not far away in Argenteuil. There, they found a large weapons cache and bomb-making materials, French Prosecutor Francois Molins has said.
For Kriket, at least, it’s not only about his latest purported plot: He was previously found guilty in absentia by a Belgian court and sentenced to 10 years in prison for being part of a jihadist network, according to Belgian court documents.
Authorities haven’t given any indication that Y.A. or Kriket had any direct involvement in the bloody March 22 bombings in Brussels. Those attacks at the city’s airport and on its subway system killed 32 people and injured more than 300, according to Belgian Minister of Health Maggie De Block.
Nor is any connection publicly known between these two men and the terror that struck Paris last November, which left 130 dead and hundreds more wounded.
Those attackers had close ties to Belgium, specifically in Brussels, where many of them had lived.
