With the support of Europol and Eurojust, a joint anti-terror operation against right-wing extremist circles was carried out on Thursday November 9th in six European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Romania). According to information on Friday, five suspects were arrested and seven others were questioned in operations that led to the confiscation of weapons, Nazi material and computer data. The militants are said to have terrorist plans.
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They were members of a group called “The Base,” a reference to their apparent desire to build networks similar to Al-Qaeda, which means “The Base” in Arabic. According to Europol and the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office, several encrypted online platforms actively called for terrorist attacks and shared instructions for the use of 3D printed firearms. Members of the group also wrote a manifesto. “Despite the young age of some suspects, there were indications that some of them pose a high risk of future action,” said Europol’s press release.
According to the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the case was opened in May by the anti-terrorism department of the Antwerp criminal police. In July, information was sent to the European Judicial Cooperation Office and two coordination meetings were organized with the aim of allowing the different national police forces to act simultaneously. A task force has been set up at Europol headquarters in The Hague.
Nazi flags and swastikas
Two people, aged 23 and 21, were arrested during searches in Belgium, Ostend in West Flanders and Diepenbeek in Limburg province. In one of them, Nazi flags and swastikas were found, as well as material that could be used to make homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails. One of the suspects, previously identified for disseminating photos of Nazi soldiers and for his sympathies with a Flemish nationalist militia, spread a terrorist message “as a leader” and tried to recruit recruits to carry out an attack, the federal agency said Office of the Attorney General. He was charged. In Croatia, police announced that two arrested suspects were minors.
In a report on jihadist and far-right threats published in 2022, Europol emphasized that political instability in several European countries, the issue of social inequalities and the war in Ukraine, as well as the issue of the threat of migration, are clearly accentuated – right-wing terrorist threats. Added to this is the war between Israel and Hamas, according to an expert from the European Police, in which radicalized people are joining the camps and violently clashing on social networks.
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