Brussels Police Open Fire on Vehicle in Terror Neighbourhood Molenbeek, ‘Explosives’ Claimed To Be Inside

Police in Brussels claim to have opened fire on a car in the Belgian capital after giving chase in the migrant-heavy suburb of Molenbeek and the arrested driver told officers he had explosives in the vehicle.

Update 14:48 EST: Police now say no explosives were found in the vehicle and that the man driving the car was not found to be armed either. They say he is “mentally unstable” but have still not identified the man.

UPDATE: Belgian police say no explosives found in Molenbeek vehicle incident, suspect "mentally unstable" and unarmed

— Lisa Daftari (@LisaDaftari) August 8, 2017

Police said that the officers opened fire on the vehicle in the early evening on Tuesday after the driver attempted to drive backwards into a police car in order to escape being trapped in traffic, Belgian broadcaster RTL reports.

The vehicle, identified as having originally come from Germany, had run a red light in the city which was the cause of the initial chase.

A police spokesman told the Belgian broadcaster, “we got the driver out, and he immediately told us that there were explosives inside.”

Police have since cordoned off the entire areas around the vehicle forcing at least 400 bystanders to remain in place while the Service for the Removal and Destruction of Explosive Devices (SEDEE) is deployed in the area.

So far police have not identified the driver of the vehicle.

The Muslim-dominated Brussels suburb of Molenbeek has been a hub for radical Islamic terrorism with residents taking part in both the Paris Bataclan massacre in late 2015 and the Brussels bombings in 2016 which claimed the lives of 32 people in separate suicide bomber attacks.

One of the perpetrators of the Bataclan attack in Paris, Salah Abdeslam, was able to hide out in Molenbeek for months before he was finally found by Belgian authorities and arrested in March of 2016.

Breitbart London editor in chief Raheem Kassam has written extensively on Molenbeek, which is considered a no-go zone, in his new book No-Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.

Kassam has been praised for his work which covers areas in Europe and North America by several prominent politicians critical of radical Islam including Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders who said, “Raheem Kassam’s book about the proliferation of no gone zones in our Western countries is a wake-up call. It is a very important book which should be read by as many people as possible because it shows that if we do not start to de-Islamize our societies and reestablish control over our own countries we are bound to lose them.”