BRUSSELS: Belgian police have conducted 14 house searches in a terrorism investigation, the federal public prosecutor’s office said on Thursday, adding seven people were taken in for questioning.
“They are suspected, among other things, of preparing a terrorist attack. The specific targets of the attack had not yet been determined,” it said in a statement.
A judge will decide later if they are to be charged.
The house searches took place in the cities of Antwerp, Liege and Ghent, among others, and in the Brussels region.
The prosecutor’s office did not immediately comment on whether the plans had a link to the Paris Olympics, which commences on Friday.
The Paris anti-terrorism prosecutor did not respond when asked if it was involved in the investigation.
The perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed and 368 wounded, largely planned and coordinated them from Belgium, with several of the attackers being Belgian nationals or residents.
In 2016, bombings at Brussels airport killed 34 people and injured 340. Among those convicted for the attacks was Salah Abdeslam, who was also the main suspect in the Paris attacks trial.

GENEVA: United Nations experts on Thursday voiced grave concern at reports of surging discrimination and violence against Pakistan’s Ahmadi minority community, including extrajudicial killings and attacks on places of worship.
The Ahmadiyya sect, considered heretics by fundamentalist groups, has been persecuted for decades in Pakistan but threats and intimidation have risen in recent years.
“We are alarmed by ongoing reports of violence and discrimination against the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan,” said the nine independent experts, including the special rapporteurs on extrajudicial executions, on freedom of expression and on freedom of religion.
“Urgent measures are necessary to respond to these violent attacks and the broader atmosphere of hatred and discrimination which feeds it,” they said in a statement.
The experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, highlighted a number of specific incidents over recent months.
Those included the extrajudicial killing of two Ahmadis in Saad Ullah Pur on July 8 and the killing on March 4 of the president of the Ahmadiyya community in Bahawalpur district.
They also noted reports of an alarming number of attacks on Ahmadi places of worship and cemeteries since the beginning of the year, including some that had led to the serious injury of worshippers.
The statement also highlighted a number of alleged arbitrary arrests of Ahmadi worshippers over religious holiday periods “to obstruct their participation in their religious practices.”
Ahmadis consider themselves Muslims, and their faith is identical to mainstream Islam in almost every way.
But their belief that the movement’s founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the “mahdi” or messiah has marked them as blasphemous unbelievers, particularly in Pakistan. There are around 500,000 Amadis in Pakistan according to their community leadership.
The constitution has branded them non-Muslims since 1974, and a 1984 law forbids them from claiming their faith as Islamic or openly practicing Islamic rituals.
“Ahmadis’ right to peacefully manifest their beliefs must be respected,” the experts insisted, warning that “judicial harassment serves to normalize violence against Ahmadis by non-State actors.”
They welcomed Pakistan National Assembly’s adoption last month of a resolution urging federal and provincial governments to ensure the safety and security of all Pakistani citizens including religious minorities.
But, they cautioned, “such good-faith efforts to counter discriminatory discourse will be ineffective unless they address its structural drivers, (including) blasphemy laws and discriminatory legal provisions.”