Belgian authorities said Monday they don’t rule out terrorism as the motive in a deadly attack at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels and have elevated the case to the federal level, the prosecutor’s spokesperson said.
Ine Van Wymersch, the spokesperson, said surveillance-camera images of the attack Saturday afternoon released by police indicate that the gunman “acted in cold blood and in a very determined way.’’
Four people died in the attack, two Israelis, one French woman and a Belgian museum employee.
The government raised the threat level at Jewish sites across the country after the attack.
Belgian federal police on Sunday released video footage showing the killer entering the building, pulling a Kalashnikov-type assault rifle from a bag, firing it and then leaving on foot. The video clip is 28 seconds long. The federal police posted the tape, along with two shorter videos of the man outside the museum, on the Internet and called on the public to help find the attacker.
Van Wymersch said that investigators had no new information to disclose on the identity or nationality of the gunman.
Israel’s ambassador to Belgium, Jacques Revah, called the extra security at Jewish sites a “sad necessity,” saying the shooting shows “there is a risk that these institutions could be attacked.”
While Belgian authorities haven’t confirmed that the killings were anti-Semitic, “the place chosen, the people chosen, the modus operandi chosen; all that indicates that it wasn’t by chance that it happened at that place,” the ambassador said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “this act of murder is the result of constant incitement against Jews and their state.”
Saturday's attack coincided with a surge of extreme-right, xenophobic and anti-Semitic parties in a number of countries in the European elections on Sunday, especially in Austria, France, Greece and Hungary.