10th suspect arrested in Paris attacks probe

Meanwhile, the Brussels City Council announced the cancellation Wednesday of the city’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the Place de Brouckere, citing concerns over terrorism.

Within five days, Ayoub B.is to appear before another judge, who will decide whether he should continue to be held in preventive detention, the Belgian prosecutor’s office said.

On Thursday, a judge ordered Said S., a Belgian national born in 1985, and Mohammed K. born in 1988, held for another month, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said. Airsoft is a type of airgun.

It is not the first time the official New Year’s Eve fireworks have been cancelled as the authorities made the same decision in 2007 because of another terror threat.

The prosecutor’s office said one of the suspects arrested this week was charged with acting as the leader and recruiter of a terrorist group planning to commit terrorist offenses, the other with participating in a terrorist group’s activities as a principal actor or co-actor. Police arrested the suspects during a series of raids in the Brussels suburbs, one of which was Molenbeek, used as a base by Islamic radicals who carried out attacks in Paris in November, the BBC reported Thursday.

In an unprecedented move the Met Police has reportedly cancelled all leave for firearms officers in London, while telling revellers to carry on as normal.

The authorities say that house raids in the Brussels area yesterday also netted a man suspected of being linked to last month’s deadly attacks in Paris.

Belgium has been on its highest alert level since the November 13 Paris attacks, whose presumed mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was Belgian and was raised in the hardscrabble Molenbeek district of Brussels.

Soldiers patrol as people celebrate the New Year in the historic center in Brussels Friday, Jan. 1, 2016.

This, after two other suspects were also detained on suspicion they too were hatching a terror plot.

The suspension of festivities in Brussels came as Paris increased security around its own New Year’s Eve celebrations and as Turkish police detained two suspected suicide bombers in Ankara, according to a report on TV24.

Both Paris and Brussels have cancelled traditional fireworks displays scheduled for Thursday night.