Belgium’s counter-terrorism agency Ocam has currently put on her radar 650 people considered “extremists” or “terrorists” and who have been prioritized under surveillance and are in a database to which all security forces have access, she announced today.

From them, 88% have been placed under surveillance due to “of their support for the jihadist ideology”, while 9% and 2% respectively for relationships with extremist elements of the extreme right and extreme left. The rest because they represent “various threats» against elites or in relation to a conflict abroad.

The figures were released at a press conference after lawmakers adopted a new legal framework for data sharing on Thursday.

This is a new law that aims to fill the loopholes found in the killing of a police officer by a radicalized former prisoner in November 2022 in Brussels.

Ocam gave the details as Friday night’s attack on a concert hall near Moscow, which was claimed by the Islamic State group, led neighboring France to raise its state of alert to the highest level on Sunday night.

In Belgium, the terrorist threat alert level remains the samei.e. in the third of a four-point scale, which means that this threat is always judged “serious”, but not “very serious”.

“To move to the fourth level, we should indeed have concrete evidence of an imminent attack and at the moment we do not have these data in Belgium“, clarified the head of Ocam, Gert Verkauteren, in the statements he made with the ministers of the interior and justice by his side.

He emphasized that this “general level” which is currently in force for the whole country, does not exclude the possibility of a localized and specific increase for some events or visits of personalities deemed to be of sensitive importance.

Belgium, which was hit in 2016 by suicide attacks in 2016 that killed 35 people, claimed responsibility for the Islamic State, lives again today in the third level of threat alert since October 16, 2023, when a radicalized Tunisian killed two in Brussels Swedes who had gone to support their national football team.

The attacker was killed by the Belgian police the next morning, while Islamic State also claimed responsibility for the double murder.

The number of 650 people in this “2023 report” shows a decrease of about 7% compared to 2022. Last year about thirty were added to this database, but “nearly 80” were removed from it.