Belgian police have detained eight people as part of an investigation into a possible jihadist plan to commit terrorist attacks. Arrests were made in the capital Brussels, in the port city of Antwerp, and in the town of Eupen near the border with Germany. None of the eight has been charged. All are still in custody.
A statement from the Belgian state prosecutor said the detentions were associated with two inquiries, one led by federal police in Brussels and the other by an investigating magistrate in Antwerp.
"There are links between the two files," the statement said, "but further research will have to show to what extent the two groups were intertwined."
The Antwerp inquiry led to five arrests, including one in Eupen; the Brussels probe led to three arrests.
The statement said at least five of those detained were suspected of planning to "commit a terrorist attack in Belgium".
All suspects have been detained but not yet charged.
The statement from the state prosecutor said the eventual target or targets had not yet been determined.
The investigations in Antwerp and Brussels initially focused on "two young adults suspected of violent radicalism", according to state broadcaster RTBF.
2016 terror trial on-going in Brussels
Ten suspects accused of involvement in the March 2016 suicide bombings that killed 32 people are being tried in Brussels.
Those bombings, at Zaventem airport and in a Brussels' metro station, were carried out by members of the same jihadist cell that killed 130 people during the November 2015 attacks in Paris. The Paris attacks were planned and prepared from hideouts in Belgium.
In its annual report published in January, Belgium's domestic intelligence service noted "a worrying rise in the number of increasingly young people falling into extremist radicalisation" of a religious and politically extreme nature.
The OCAM national threat analysis centre said on Tuesday that Belgium's terror alert level would remain at "medium", a level of two on a scale with a maximum of four.
