Jewish schools in Brussels and Antwerp will be closed on Friday because of increasing terror threat against sensitive targets, one day after a vast anti-terrorist police operation in Belgium against jihadists returning from Syria.
Belgian police killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch “terrorist attacks on a grand scale”.
The decision to cancel classes in Jewish schools around the country was taken after a security analysis made by the internal security service of the Jewish community on the basis of the available information, reports said.
According to Antwerp’s Joods Actueel Jewish magazine, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, which advises Israeli embassies in countries with important Jewish communities, took part in the security analysis.
Around 40,000 Jews live in the country.
The only Orthodox Jewish school in Holland, the Cheider School in Amsterdam, was also closed on Friday as a precautionary measure.
Belgian Magistrate Eric Van der Sypt told reporters Thursday that the suspects killed in the eastern city of Verviers during a raid were on the verge of committing a major terrorist attack in Belgium.
He told an emergency press conference that that Belgium's terror alert level was raised to its second highest level.
Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, including 4 Jewish men in a kosher supermarket, Belgium’s police operation fuelled fears across Europe of young Muslims returning radicalised from Syria to commit terror attacks. But the Belgian probe had been under way before the Paris attacks and Belgian officials saw no obvious link between the two.
In May 2014, an Islamist terrorist, Mehdi Nemmouche, who had also joined jihadist groups in Syria before returning to Europe, killed four people in the Brussels Jewish Museum.