Suspect arrested after three-hour manhunt tried to force a car through gates of barracks near Namur but fled when soldiers opened fire

A suspect has been arrested after a lone attacker tried to ram a car through the gates of a military barracks in Belgium and then fled when soldiers replied with more than a dozen gunshots.

Police detained the suspect after a three-hour manhunt around Flawinne, a suburb of the southern city of Namur where Belgium’s 2nd Commando Battalion has its base.

Prosecutor Vincent Macq said no motives could be excluded but that evidence did not immediately point to an attempted terrorist attack. “It is important to calm people. There is nothing to suggest there are others involved,” he told the Belga news agency.

Macq described the suspect as a local in his thirties who had once tried to join the military. He was unarmed and had tried to hide with other locals around the base when he fled, Macq said.

“It was more a man on the run than a threatening man. It is someone who was not on any of our radical lists, he his unknown by our security services, and I want to add that for the moment nothing can let us say that we are facing a terror lead.”



Since a gunman killed four people in a May 2014 attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels, Belgium has been on higher alert for further extremist attacks. Police cordoned off the area from 9.40am until 10.30am following the attack on the base and a video posted on Twitter shows officers apparently outside a supermarket.



The vehicle’s owner is said to have been identified after the car, a Ford Focus, was found in Belgrade, near Flawinne. Bomb squad officials were on the scene after witnesses told Belgian media that the man was apparently carrying something heavy in a case but prosecutors and police later said there were no explosives.

Bruno Fahy (@BrunoFahy) Attaque de la caserne de #flawinne ce matin. La voiture de l'assaillant a été retrouvée @BelgaImage pic.twitter.com/cPjaLavovc

“No one was hurt, it seems,” a spokesman for prosecutors in Namur was reported as saying. “If I look at it from an outsider’s point of view, it seems incomprehensible,” he said. “Why would you attack a military barracks? There are plenty of weapons there to strike back.”

No immediate motive for the attack was known. The defence minister, Steven Vandeput, said the intruder’s motive remained unclear but insisted “it is certainly an aggression targeting the barracks.”

The Flawinne barracks are home to a commando battalion of 650 soldiers who take part in Nato operations and peacekeeping missions.

Security was increased around the European commission, embassies and Jewish schools in Brussels after two men were killed in a police raid against a suspected terrorist cell in Verviers last January.

A 29-year-old man arrested in connection with the 2014 attack on the Jewish museum, Mehdi Nemmouche, is believed to have spent over a year in Syria. Police officers reportedly found a short video featuring the flag of Islamic State in his luggage.