Belgian police kill 2 in raid on suspected Islamists

Jan 16 Belgian police have killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch terrorist attacks on a grand scale. Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, the incident heightened fears across Europe of young local Muslims returning radicalised from Syria. But prosecutor said the Belgian probe had been under way before the January 7 attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. A third man was detained in the eastern city of Verviers, where police commandos ran into a hail of gunfire after trying to gain entry to an apartment above a town centre bakery. All three suspects were citizens of Belgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.