“WE FEARED A TERROR ATTACK”:

The Molenbeek district in Brussels Belgium has been the eye of the European terrorist storm since it emerged that it was home to core members of the Paris attack squad. Police arrested Salah Abdeslam on Friday, 18 March, 2016 just a block from the family home in Molenbeek, a district where he once ran a bar with his brother Brahim - who blew himself up during the attacks in the French capital in November, 2015. The suspected Paris ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, also hailed from Molenbeek and was a friend of Salah Abdeslam. As far back as 2001, it was in Molenbeek where the assassins of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud had stayed. It was also home to one of the 2004 Madrid train bombers and the main suspect in the 2014 Jewish Museum attack in Brussels, while the perpetrator of a foiled attack in August, 2015 on an Amsterdam-Paris train stayed in Molenbeek with his sister before boarding in Brussels. But it is the sheer size of the network in Belgium that has emerged since the Paris attacks which has most alarmed officials. Not only was Abdeslam allegedly helped by several people after fleeing back to Brussels after the attacks, but the Paris cell had rented at least three properties around the country which were used to prepare the attacks. In the days after Abdeslam's arrest, Belgian authorities feared that a terror plot was afoot. "He was ready to restart something in Brussels, and it may be the reality because we have found a lot of heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels," FM Didier Reynders said. A grim-faced PM Charles Michel said on Tuesday: "We feared a terror attack and it happened." (INN)