JERUSALEM – Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon told reporters he wants a register of everyone living in Molenbeek, a Muslim suburb of Brussels dubbed the jihadi capital of Europe, because it is not clear at present who is living there, the Telegraph reported.
“In my opinion, the municipal administration must go and knock on every door and ask who actually lives there,” Jambon said. “It is unacceptable that we do not know who is living in the commune.”
The Telegraph reported that Belgian law requires residents to register with the local commune in order to put a name on their doorbells.
Jambon’s plan calls for police to confirm that all residents of Molenbeek are properly registered.
Brussels was put on a high security alert on Saturday following terrorist threats of a “serious and imminent” nature, with the city’s metro shut down and people instructed to avoid crowded areas. The US warned citizens visiting the Belgian capital to stay indoors.
Suspected terrorist Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old resident of Molenbeek, returned to Brussels from Paris shortly after the attacks in which his elder brother Brahim blew himself up at a cafe.
French authorities pegged Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a 28-year-old who also grew up in Molenbeek, as the mastermind behind the Paris attacks that killed 132 people. Abaaoud, who fought alongside ISIS in Syria, was killed in a police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of St Denis on Wednesday.
The fugitive Abdeslam reportedly knew Abaaoud while in prison for petty crime. According to Ynet, as Abdeslam was driven back to Brussels early last Saturday, he was pulled over three times by French police but not arrested.
As Breibart Jerusalem reported, Abaaoud himself boasted of his ability to slip in and out of Europe and Syria unnoticed by authorities.
“My name and picture were all over the news, yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary,” said Abaaoud. “I was even stopped by an officer who contemplated me so as to compare me to the picture, but he let me go, as he did not see the resemblance!”
Along with Salah Abdeslam’s brother, another man from Molenbeek, Bilal Hadfi, was among the Paris suicide bombers.
Teun Voeten, a former resident of Molenbeek, recently wrote an expose in Politico on the daily horrors taking place in the largely Muslim neighborhood, including white girls being spat at and called “filthy whores,” gays and Jews being terrorized, and fanatics pressuring female passersby to wear the veil. Voeten finally decided to leave the neighborhood after a Salafist attempted to convert him on the street. “It boiled down to this,” writes Voeten, “I could no longer stand to live in this despondent, destitute, fatalistic neighborhood.”
The last time any region of Belgium was put on alert was in May 2014 when an Islamist terrorist shot four people dead at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. Jewish schools, synagogues, and other institutions were put on maximum security alert.
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