BRUSSELS — Authorities in the Belgian capital shot and killed a Tunisian national on Tuesday hours after they say he gunned down three Swedish soccer fans, killing two of them, and posted a video online in which he claimed credit for the attack and said the Quran was “a red line for which he is ready to sacrifice himself.”
Investigators are still trying to determine the motive for Monday night’s attack, which happened not far from where Belgium’s men’s soccer team was hosting Sweden in a European Championships qualifier. The match was suspended at halftime and the more than 35,000 fans were kept inside the stadium as a precaution while the attacker was at large.
Amateur videos of the attack posted on social media showed a man wearing an orange fluorescent vest pull up on a scooter, take out a large weapon and open fire on people getting out of a taxi. He chased them into a building to gun them down. He was also filmed calmly loading his weapon as cars drove by slowly.
Sweden’s foreign ministry said the men who were killed were in their 60s and 70s, and the man who was wounded is in his 70s and remains hospitalized.
Hours after the suspect disappeared into the night and a manhunt was launched, Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “the perpetrator of the terrorist attack in Brussels has been identified and has died.”
She thanked Belgium’s intelligence and security services, as well as prosecutors, “for their swift and decisive action.” The man was shot in the Schaerbeek neighborhood near where the attack happened.
Federal prosecutors said later that the suspect, a 45-year-old Tunisian man who had been living in Belgium illegally and whose name hasn’t been released, was found after a witness spotted him in a Schaerbeek cafe. Police arrived at the scene and the suspect was shot as they tried to arrest him. First responders attempted to save the man, but he later died in hospital.
The weapon used in the assault, an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle, and a bag of clothes were recovered at the scene, federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said at a Tuesday news conference. Police launched four raids Tuesday and detained two people for questioning over their possible links to the suspect, he said, noting that authorities haven’t ruled out the possibility that he might have had help.
“It does not seem at the stage of the investigation that the terrorist attack was organized by a large terror network,” Van Leeuw said. “The hypothesis that he was acting as a lone wolf seems more likely.”
