According to Pprune:
The obvious question is if this is a terrorist attack in retaliation for the recent Paris terrorist attack arrest.
The CNN scroll says just before the blasts witnesses heard shouting in Arabic and shots fired.
There’s another explosion at the Maelbeek metro station.
Maybe the sleeper cells feared that Abdeslam, who is under police custody, knew too much about their structure and are jumping the gun.
My wife takes that metro line every day. She was there an hour before the blast. She’s ok but getting back home is going to be hassle. Our daughters are at school not too far from my workplace so in case of emergency I’ll go and pick them up.
I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for years. It was just a matter of time, really…
Because…?
Be safe.
New York, London, Barcelona, Paris and countless places all around the world. Why would Brussels have been spared?
Belgium, much like France, has a long-standing issue with poorly-integrated 2nd and 3rd generation descendants of North Africans. Neighbourhoods like Molenbeek are a hotbed for radicalization.
I’m glad your wife and daughters are safe, Les Espaces Du Sommeil.
As always in such cases, there have been rumours of attacks pretty much everywhere in Brussels, all of them turning out to be just that: rumours.
So far, “only” the attacks at Zaventem airport and one metro station are confirmed. 13-21 dead, announced just now
I saw that the Taxi’s in Brussels arent charging for taking people home
Watching a witness talk on the BBC right now, it seems like one bomb went off, people ran towards the exit and the second bomb!
Lots of interviews with airport witnesses, none with the station. I’m remembering 7/7, I hope that they got everyone out by now.
Scary times in Europe now, the Belgian president said that they were expecting it.
So sad.
I imagine how you feel. My mother-in-law also takes that metro line every day and she’s alone in Belgium, so we are worried about her.
My oldest daughter lives in Mons, Belgium. Her sister was flying in to visit her, supposed to land in Brussels and take the metro over to Mons. Needless to say, my wife and I were panicky this morning on hearing the news. Fortunately, the Belgium-bound daughter was just boarding a connecting flight in Iceland when this all went down. She is stuck in Iceland, but safe.
Yeah, Iceland is probably one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment…
No news from her?
The timing makes that seem very plausible.
Hoping for the best for FreddyJ’s mother-in-law.
One wonders if the timing so soon after the capture of the Paris suspect is significant. It could very well be that they were afraid he’d provide enough intelligence to lead to serious damage to the organization that they thought they might as well strike before being decapitated themselves.
On the positive note, if they struck the biggest blow they could and only killed less than a score of people, maybe they’re not so fearsome after all. My guess is that the new reality is that a few times a year, 10-20 people are going to be killed in terror attacks. It’s the new normal.
That’s overthinking it, IMHO. The way I see it, this is, to them, simple payback - “You got one of ours, now we got a bunch of yours.”
That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I said that I had been expecting this. I told this to my wife at the time of the Merah attacks.
Sister in law lives in Brussels; she’s okay. Her son (my nephew) is in school and we haven’t yet heard that they’re together and safe again yet, but no indication that his school was near any trouble areas.