As dusk fell in the west Brussels suburb of Molenbeek on Saturday evening, it became apparent this was not another regular weekend.
Just after 4pm about half a dozen police vans with heavily armed officers and sniffer dogs raided the quiet residential street of Rue Dubois-Thorn, closing off both ends of the road. At 5.30pm a team of bomb disposal experts arrived and surrounded a Volkswagen car parked on the street. Less than an hour later a police van carrying the car made its way from behind the police cordons and left the area.
“We are shocked, absolutely. It is a quiet area. We have been told that a bomb was inside the car,” said one resident of Rue Dubois-Thorn, a 50-year-old man of North African origin.
It appears that police were led to the Molenbeek area on Saturday following the discovery of a parking ticket in one of the vehicles believed to have been used to transport one of the Paris attackers 24 hours earlier.
Witnesses who saw the Paris attacks spoke of seeing some of the assassins emerge from a car with Belgian-registered plates near Bataclan concert hall on Friday night.
French nationals
Latest reports indicate that three of the Paris attackers were French nationals living in Brussels. Brussels-born
Abdeslam Salah
, a 26-year-old suspect described as “dangerous” was on the run last night. In total, three suspects were arrested in Molenbeek on Saturday and four more yesterday.
Molenbeek has been here before. Located just 3km west of Brussels's gold-gilded Grand Place in the city centre, the commune of Sint-Jans Molenbeek has previous links to terrorism. In January, police made nine arrests in the district as part of a counter-terrorism operation launched in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The lone attacker who boarded a packed Amsterdam-Paris train in Brussels in August, but was overpowered by passengers, lived in an apartment in the area.
Most of the residents of the canal-side district are of Moroccan and Turkish origin. Many of them moved to Belgium in the 1960s and 70s. Signs of its multi-cultural heritage are everywhere: Women wear headscarves; there is a small Turkish supermarket at the end of Rue Dubois-Thorn.
Despite descriptions in local media of Molenbeek as a den of fundamentalism, the street where the raids took place is a quiet, well-kept area, just beside a busy Metro station. Four young men from the area who spoke to The Irish Times, expressed shock at the events that took place on Saturday.
University students
All four were in their early-20s and were university students in Brussels. Three had been born to Moroccan parents in Brussels, the fourth had moved to Brussels from
Morocco
when he was three.
“Molenbeek is a big area, but people are integrated into society,” said Yassim (20) a university student who speaks fluent English. All four had attended secondary school at the bottom of Rue Dubois-Thorn where the raids took place.
Nonetheless, the arrests of five people yesterday has sparked national outrage in Belgium about the possibility that regions of Brussels are centres of jihadist activity.
Belgian prime minister Charles Michel announced yesterday that a plan would be put in place to help tackle radicalism in the area.
“I accept that there is almost always a link with Molenbeek, that there is an enormous problem,” he said, pledging federal funds for the area.
Home affairs minister Jan Jambon said the situation was "out of control" in the district pledging the creation of a specific plan for the municipality.
As Belgian prosecutors continue to question the suspects arrested in separate raids in Molenbeek on Saturday and yesterday, Belgium remains on high alert.
While heavily armed police and soldiers have been a familiar presence in Brussels since the June 2014 shooting in the Jewish museum in central Brussels, on Saturday authorities raised the terror threat level from two to three for large sporting and cultural events.
Heavy security is expected at an international football match between Belgium and Spain on Tuesday.
Mr Michel captured the sense of crisis that is now hitting countries such as Belgium.
Noting that there has been at least one attack or foiled plot in France and Belgium each month over the last year, he said these events showed that "we've entered another chapter in European history in which stronger efforts to cooperate and share intelligence will be key".