A man stabbed two Brussels police officers Wednesday morning in what authorities suspect is a terror attack. The attacker, a 43-year-old Belgian citizen, reportedly knifed one officer in the neck, and impaled the other in the abdomen.
The suspect tried to flee, and broke the nose of one of the responding officers. The attacker was eventually subdued after a cop shot him in the leg. None of the policemen sustained life-threatening injuries. The suspect was taken to the hospital.
“We have reason to believe that it is terror-related,” a spokesman for the Belgian prosecutor’s office said, though he did not say what officials found to potentially link the attack to terrorism. Prosecutors identified the suspect as a Belgian citizen named Hicham D.
The assault occurred in the Schaerbeek, an immigrant neighborhood in the Belgian capital that became a focus in this year’s investigation into the March 22 Brussels bombing. The suspects who set off suicide bombs at the Zaventem airport took a taxi from a Schaerbeek address, where authorities later found explosives and ISIS paraphernalia. One of those men, 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui, who blew himself up in the airport, grew up in the neighborhood. Laachraoui is the suspected bomb maker in the Brussels blasts and the Paris massacre last year that killed 130.
