Belgium: Terrorist shooting underlines tense mood in Europe

After an extraordinary night and morning, things feel surprisingly normal in Schaerbeek. People in the bustling, largely working-class Brussels neighborhood seem to go about their day as usual, frequenting butchers and bakeries.

Except on Rue Van Oost, the street where the man suspected of killing two Swedish football fans and wounding a third in the center of the Belgian capital Monday evening was shot dead by police the following morning.

Many shops here were shuttered when DW visited the scene on Tuesday. Passersby and journalists watched on as police removed barriers blocking the view into a café, Al Khaima.

It was here that police shot 45-year-old Tunisian national Abdesalam L. after a night-long search that saw Schaerbeek, where he resided without Belgian authorities' knowledge, on even higher alert than the rest of the city. Shortly after, the man was confirmed dead in hospital.

Locals are clearly shaken. A woman named Jul who did not disclose her surname or age told DW the goings-on reminded her of the 2016 Islamic State (IS)-affiliated Brussels terror attacks that killed 32. "We were all scared. It impacted us. On my way to work, police officers told me to go home because it was dangerous … This really impacted me. I had a panic attack."

Hassan, a 50-year-old lifelong Schaerbeek resident who declined to give his last name, told DW that he used to see Abdesalam L. around the neighborhood or praying at the mosque. Schaerbeek is home to many migrants, he explained: "It's very mixed."

"You wouldn't suspect that this guy was in official files, radicalized. That he was capable of such things," Hassan said. "You can never know what anyone is doing."

Shooting in Belgium, stabbing in France

Abdesalam L., who was living irregularly in Belgium after his asylum claim was rejected, was possibly motivated by provocative Quran burnings in Sweden. In videos posted on social media, the man claimed he had shot the Swedes for revenge, Belgian media reported.

IS claimed responsibility for the attack late Tuesday on Telegram, according to news agency Reuters.

The shootings in Belgium come on the heels of a fatal school stabbing in France last week. A teacher in the northern town of Arras was knifed by a 20-year-old Russian national from the southern Caucasus region of Chechnya who had grown up in France.

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron issued a stark warning at a press conference in Tirana. "All European states are vulnerable … Islamist terrorism is indeed making a comeback."

A moment of heightened international tension

The recent attacks in Belgium and France are not at the scale of those carried out or inspired by IS in Europe from 2014 onwards, when at the peak of its power the militant Islamist group presided over a now-defeated proto-state.

But they come at a moment of heightened tension in the Middle East and the wider world. Israel has declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas following massive terrorist attacks on Israeli territory, imposing a total blockade on Gaza. Some 1,400 Israelis and more than 2,700 Palestinians have been killed so far.

At present, there is no immediate connection between these events and the two attacks in France and Belgium, Amelie Godefroidt of KU Leuven University in Belgium told DW. 

However, the renewed tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are serving "to reactivate long-standing grievances," Godefroidt said. While Sweden's Quran burnings seem to be the likely trigger for the Brussels attack, the perpetrator had also reportedly posted in solidarity with the Palestinian people, Godefroidt said. Many others also do so, she said.

For Thomas Renard, director of the International Center for Counter-Terrorism, a Dutch think tank, events in the Middle East are clearly having a "destabilizing impact across the world. We've seen incidents in Europe, but also in the US, in China."

A Palestinian-American six-year-old was stabbed to death in the United States last week by a man charged with murder in what authorities are treating as an anti-Muslim hate crime. In Beijing, a man who worked at the Israeli embassy was stabbed, though the motive was not immediately established.

As a result, some countries are paying "more vigilance towards specific potential targets linked to either Jewish communities or potentially Muslim communities," Renard said.

Further polarization likely

Unsurprisingly, terrorist attacks have a strong impact on public opinion in countries where they are carried out, Godefroidt told DW. "The days and weeks after the attack, of course, people are afraid, and people are angry. Such an attack, it evokes a lot of emotions. And those emotions are very important for political and social attitudes."

"So we do see ... a push to the right," she said. "They ask for more police or military presence on the street, they ask for right-wing policies such as stricter immigration policies."

However, the long-term evidence is less clear, she said, because such spikes in sentiment tend to be temporary.

Godefroidt said she is concerned things will get even more heated and violence will ensue — on both sides. "On the one hand, you will have these Islamophobic responses, a hardening of the hearts of common French and Belgian people," she told DW.

"On the other hand, it is true that there's also heightened tension on the political Islamist [side]. I fear that in the years to come, we might see this polarization growing and nurturing violence," she said.

Back in Schaerbeek, another local named Fatih insisted to DW that the actions of Abdesalam L. did not reflect their shared faith. "I'm a Muslim. Doing this in the name of Islam is not right because according to the religion, killing is wrong," Fatih said. "So generalizing that to all Muslims and all Islamic peoples is a bad thing," he said.

"The message I want to send is that this is a very bad act," Fatih continued. "Killing someone is bad, taking someone's life is bad, that's what I have to say."

Rosie Birchard and Marta Vigano contributed additional reporting to this story.