Belgian PM slayings probed as terror for now

BRUSSELS (AP/WTVQ) – Belgian Prime Minister Michel says the convict who killed two police officers and a bystander in the city of Liege was indirectly mentioned in state security reports on radicalization.

A knife-wielding man, identified as Benjamin Herman, approached the two female officers from behind, stabbed them multiple times Tuesday in the Belgian city of Liege near a café on the Boulevard d’Avroy, stole their handguns, and shot them and a bystander dead in an attack that prosecutors fear could be terror-related.

Christian Beaupere, Chief of Liege Police, said the attacker also wounded four others before being shot dead by police.

He said “the goal of the attacker was to target the police.”

The policewomen were aged 45 and 53, the latter a mother of twins.

Spokesman Philippe Dulieu said the attacker also shot dead a 22-year-old man in a nearby vehicle.

Prime Minister Michel said Herman, appeared in the security reports “in notes that did not primarily target him, but others or other situations.”

The prime minister says Herman did not have his name on a list maintained by an anti-terror assessment group.

Michel said: “Different services considered that, based on the elements they had, there was no reason to give him such a qualification.”

He says the slayings will involve, at least initially, “an investigation for terrorism.”