Belgium’s ambassador to Australia has rejected claims by Malcolm Turnbull that Europe’s security is weak as “unfair”, and said blaming the Syrian refugee crisis for terrorism in Europe was dangerous.

At the Lowy Institute on Wednesday the prime minister said “early signs” indicated the Brussels attacks had been inspired or planned by Islamic State in Syria. “Recent intelligence indicates that Isil is using the [Syrian] refugee crisis to send operatives into Europe,” he said.

Belgium’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Luc Bodson, said the statement was “dangerous because it’s precisely what Isis wants, that we would make a confusion between terrorism and migration and between terrorism and Islam”.

He said the Belgian prime minister had asked people “not to blame one community because this is the worst thing that we could do and this is the most counterproductive”.

“In the immigration flux you have, especially from Syria, a lot of people from the middle classes, educated people, people who had money, and who can be useful to the European economy, provided we manage to organise that flux and this is a challenge.”

Bodson also rejected suggestions Belgium had failed disenfranchised communities or had weak security arrangements.

He said it was “really unfair” to say Belgium had failed because it had been the victim of terrorist attacks in Brussels. Suggestions the country was a staging post for Isis attacks were “widely exaggerated”.

“You have had attacks in most countries ... in the USA, in Europe, they’ve taken place in Paris ... in London, in Madrid, in Rome, even in Russia and nobody thinks that Russian intelligence and security services are weak,” he said.

Bodson said Isis’s attempts to radicalise people were sophisticated and “every country is vulnerable” to the danger.

“No one is immune so of course Belgium, there are things that we could have done better. There is no denying that, but now just pointing that and saying it has been a hotbed for terrorism we have not done anything and therefore we have a terrorist attack, I think it’s really unfair.”



On Wednesday Turnbull said Australia was in a stronger security position than Europe because the country has “strong border protection”, with fewer porous borders, and “a much greater insight into people who we would regard as being threats or likely to pose a risk to safety of Australians”.

Turnbull said there had been a “real breakdown in intelligence” in Europe. “If you can’t control your borders, you don’t know who’s coming or going. Regrettably they allowed things to slip and that weakness in European security is not unrelated to the problems they’ve been having in recent times.”

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said “it’s a bit early, in my opinion, to start diagnosing everything that’s happened in Brussels”. He accepted Europe’s geography made it easier to enter and “it is possible to move around the various nations more easily”.

The attorney general, George Brandis, said there has “been a lot of commentary in Europe” to the effect that European countries had underestimated the risk posed by returned foreign fighters, but he did not want to comment on the claim.

He said it was up to individual states to act on security intelligence to protect their populations, and reassured Australians the federal police and Asio were doing a good job to keep people safe.

Brandis said a terrorist attack in Australia was still rated as “probable”. The government had decided to increase security at airports, he said.