The arrest was one of three made Friday that were tied to the arrest in Paris on Thursday of a jihadist convicted in Belgium last year and suspected of planning a new attack, officials said.
“I can confirm a police operation targeting a person who was intercepted by police and suffered a slight leg injury,” Schaerbeek Mayor Bernard Clerfayt told AFP.
Lyna Hadaad watched from her window across the street as cops tried to arrest the man.
“There was police everywhere, they were telling a man to lie on the ground,” Hadaad, 31, told the Wall Street Journal.
But the man grabbed a woman who was with a little girl, she said. After the girl escaped, cops opened fire and the woman also managed to flee.
A suspected bomb factory was found this week at the site of the operation, which was connected to a foiled terror plot in France, officials said.
Images from the scene show a man lying by a tram station holding a small backpack. The man, carrying a bag of explosives materials, was dragged away by police after a bomb-disposal robot cleared him.
Clerfayt said he has been linked to the attacks in Brussels.
He also was linked to the arrest of 34-year-old Frenchman Reda Kriket in Paris a day earlier — said to be in the advanced stages of planning an attack, a police source told AFP.
Kriket, who was wanted since January on suspicion of links to terrorism, was found with heavy weapons and explosives in his apartment.
Officials say Kriket has connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks who died in a police raid.
A Belgian official said Kriket was convicted in absentia in July along with Abaaoud and others for being part of a recruiting network for jihad in Syria.
Kriket also was linked to the tubby jihadi recruiter Khalid Zerkani, nicknamed “Papa Noel.”[new york post]
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