Belgium police kill 2 in anti-terror raid

VERVIERS, Belgium – With Europe dreading more terror, Belgian authorities seized the initiative and said they pre-empted a major attack by as little as hours yesterday, killing two suspects in a firefight and arresting a third in a vast anti-terrorism sweep that stretched into the night.

"You could smell the gunpowder," said neighbor Alexandre Massaux following a minutes-long firefight with automatic weapons and Kalashnikovs that was also punctuated by explosions.

Two suspects were killed and a third arrested and charged with belonging to a terrorist organization in the raid on a former bakery.

"As soon as they thought special forces were there, they opened fire," federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said.

Police continued with searches in Verviers and the greater Brussels area, seeking more clues in a weeks-long investigation that started well before the terrorism spree last week that led to 17 deaths in the Paris area.

The Belgian operations had no apparent link to the terrorist acts committed in France.

The suspects in Belgium were reportedly aiming at hard targets: police installations.

"They were on the verge of committing important terror attacks," Van der Sypt told a news conference in Brussels.

The Verviers suspects "were extremely well-armed men" equipped with automatic weapons, he said.

Authorities have previously said 300 Belgian residents have gone to fight with extremist Islamic formations in Syria; it is unclear how many have returned.

The suspects in Verviers opened fire on police when they closed in on them near the city's train station, the magistrate told reporters. There was an intense firefight for several minutes.

No police were wounded or killed in the clash, which occurred at the height of rush hour in a crowded neighborhood of this former industrial town of 56,000 about 80 miles southeast of the capital, Brussels.

Belgian authorities said they were looking into possible links between a man they arrested in the southern city of Charleroi and Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people in a Paris kosher market last week.

The man arrested in Belgium "claims that he wanted to buy a car from the wife of Coulibaly," Van der Sypt said. "At this moment this is the only link between what happened in Paris."

At first, the man came to police himself claiming there had been contact with Coulibaly's common-law wife regarding the car, but he was arrested following a search of his premises when indications of illegal weapons trading were found.