EPA ‘I’m going to clean up Molenbeek’ Belgian interior minister said “we can’t accept this any longer,” vows anti-terror crackdown.

Belgium's interior minister vowed Saturday to force the Brussels district of Molenbeek — a hotspot for Muslim extremists — to clean up its act.

Speaking on VTM News Saturday evening, Jan Jambon criticized authorities in Molenbeek and elsewhere in Brussels for failing to tackle radicalization with the same degree of success as elsewhere in Belgium. Law enforcement authorities traced suspects in the Paris terror attacks to Molenbeek, where they arrested three people Saturday.

"I'm going to clean up Molenbeek," Jambon said. "We can't accept this any longer — we have to look at how to tackle this problem, how to eradicate it once and for all."

"[The attacks in Paris] confronts us with ourselves, and shows that we have to focus on security every day again," Jambon said. "This reflects very badly."

There were police operations on Saturday after police in Paris found a rental car with Belgian plates that was likely used by the attackers parked near the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 people were killed.

Jambon said that Antwerp and Vilvoorde, which was the scene of a police anti-terror operation days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January, were taking steps to stop people leaving for Syria to be radicalized, thanks to cooperation between police, local authorities and state security forces.

He said he wants to find out why Brussels, and Molenbeek in particular, is not having the same level of success.

Last week at a POLITICO conference on dealing with extremism, Jambon said that Belgium had gotten a better grip on the problem over the past year, but said the exception was Brussels. He blamed a fragmented police force. (Full video of the event is above; Jambon's interview starts at 17:22 in.)

“Brussels is a relatively small city, 1.2 million,” Jambon said. “And yet we have six police departments. Nineteen different municipalities. New York is a city of 11 million. How many police departments do they have? One.”