Some details of attack in Brussels revealed

A gunman who shot dead two Swedish football supporters in central Brussels was still on the run on October 17 morning, prime minister Alexander De Croo has said, calling the attack “terrorist madness”, Report informs referring to The Guardian.

The Swedish national football team were playing against Belgium at King Baudouin Stadium, about 5km away, on Monday evening but the match was abandoned at half-time after news of the attack and the crowd was instructed to stay inside the stadium.

More than 35,000 football fans attending the Belgium-Sweden football match remained inside the stadium until the evacuation began just before midnight.

Police officers provided extra protection for Swedish nationals at the game, escorting Sweden’s national players directly to the airport to leave safely, Belgium’s football association CEO told the RTBF channel.

The suspect in the shooting was a 45-year-old Tunisian man who had probably been living in Belgium since 2016 and who had applied for asylum in 2019, justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told reporters on Tuesday.

Police had been aware of him since 2016 when a foreign police service classed him as radicalised, however nothing concrete had been done with the information as there were so many such reports at that time, Van Quickenborne said.

Nicole de Moor, the state secretary for asylum and migration, said the suspect’s asylum application had been rejected in 2020, after which he disappeared from authority’s radar.

The federal prosecutor’s office confirmed to local media that an address in the Schaarbeek neighbourhood of Brussels where the suspect was thought to have been staying had been searched overnight but he was not found.

The gunman, who was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and using an automatic rifle, fled the scene on a scooter after the incident, according to a video shared by the Flemish newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.