Iranian-Belgian Couple and Iranian Diplomat Arrested in Terror Plot on Opposition Conference

July 3, 2018

A Belgian couple and an apparent Iranian diplomat were among four people arrested over the weekend in connection with a planned bomb attack at a large rally held by Iranian opposition groups and attended by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, authorities in Brussels said Monday.

The Iranian-heritage couple, identified only as 38-year-old Amir S. and 33-year-old Nasimeh N., were apprehended on Saturday after police stopped them and searched their car in the Woluwé-Saint-Pierre neighborhood of Brussels. Investigators found more than a pound of TATP explosives and a detonator, said Eric Van der Sijpt, spokesman for the Belgian prosecutor’s office.

“We can say we arrested them just in time,” Van der Sijpt told The Associated Press. TATP has been used in several terror attacks in Europe in recent years, including twin bombings in Brussels that killed 32 people in 2016.

Van der Sijpt added that two other men had been arrested in connection with the plot, one in France and one in Germany. The man arrested in Germany, the spokesman said, “seems to be” a diplomat attached to the Iranian embassy in Vienna, Austria. A report by Belgian broadcaster RTBF described the man as a “contact” of the arrested couple.

In a statement, Giuliani praised the “fine work” of law enforcement in France and Belgium and said the foiled attack “accentuates the growing sense that the regime that is the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world is increasingly weakened by constant large demonstrations in over 140 cities.”

Police estimated that 25,000 people attended the rally held by the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Villepinte, a suburb of the French capital. However, multiple sources said the attendance was between 80,000 and 100,000.