The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group or Baader–Meinhof Gang, was a West German far-left militant organization founded in 1970. Key early figures included Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Horst Mahler, among others. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany considered the Red Army Faction to be a terrorist organization. The group was motivated by leftist political concerns and the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past and received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services.
Marc Paul Alain Dutroux is a Belgian convicted serial killer, rapist, and child molester.
The Hofstad Network was an Islamist terror group composed mostly of Dutch citizens. The terror group was composed mainly of young men between the ages of 18 and 32. The name "Hofstad" was originally the codename the Dutch secret service AIVD used for the network and leaked to the media. The name likely refers to the nickname of the city of The Hague, where some of the suspected terrorists lived. The network was active throughout the 2000s.
Cellules Communistes Combattantes was a Communist Belgian urban guerrilla organization.
Left-wing terrorism or far-left terrorism, sometimes called Marxist–Leninist terrorism or revolutionary left-wing terrorism, is terrorism committed with the aim of overthrowing current capitalist systems and replacing them with Marxist–Leninist or socialist societies. Left-wing terrorism can also occur within already socialist states as criminal action against the current ruling government.
Kapllan Murat is a Belgian criminal of Albanian descent. He is nicknamed "Getaway King", for his multiple successful prison escapes. He was a driver for the notorious Haemers gang, who kidnapped former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Vanden Boeynants in 1989.
Bloed, Bodem, Eer en Trouw was a Flemish neo-Nazi group, created in 2004 from a splinter of the Flemish branch of the international Nazi skinhead organization Blood & Honour.
Philippe Servaty is a Belgian journalist who formerly worked for Brussels-based newspaper Le Soir. While in Morocco from 2002–05, he engaged in sex with over 80 Moroccan women, promising to take them to Belgium. Before leaving for Belgium, he asked them for sexual photos as souvenirs and photographed them in poses that could be seen as degrading. They included ejaculating on the face of a veiled woman and having another woman kneel, bound, and gagged while he urinated on her. After returning to Belgium, he published the photos on the internet under the pseudonym 'Belguel'.
Bart Albert Liliane De Wever is a Belgian politician. Since 2004 De Wever has been the leader of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), a political party advocating for the independence of Flanders. He is also a member of the Chamber of Representatives. De Wever played a prominent role in the 2007 Belgian government formation and presided over his party's victory in the 2010 federal elections when N-VA became the largest party in both Flanders and in Belgium as a whole.
Stefan Wisniewski is a former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Abdelkader Belliraj is a Moroccan-Belgian citizen who was found guilty in 2009 of arms smuggling and planning terrorist attacks in Morocco.
Nathalie Ménigon, was convicted for acts of terrorism committed while she was a member of the French revolutionary group Action directe. She was sentenced to life in prison in 1989 and freed in August 2008 after serving more than 20 years in prison.
On the afternoon of 24 May 2014, a gunman opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people. Three of them, an Israeli couple on holiday and a French woman, died at the scene. The fourth victim, a Belgian employee of the museum, was taken to the hospital but died of his injuries on 6 June. A little less than a week later, on 30 May 2014, a suspect was arrested in the French city of Marseille in connection with the shooting. The suspect was Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian origin. A second suspect, Nacer Bendrer, was identified and arrested later.
On 15 January 2015, Belgian police carried out a raid on premises in Verviers, Belgium. According to news sources, the raids were an anti-terrorist operation against Islamist radicals.
Ibrahim El Bakraoui was a Belgian-Moroccan terrorist, confirmed to be one of the suicide bombers at the Brussels Airport in the 2016 Brussels bombings.
Khālid El Bakraoui, also known as Abū Walīd al-Baljīkī, was a Belgian national of Moroccan descent, confirmed to be the suicide bomber at the metro station in the 2016 Brussels bombings.
Events in the year 2018 in Belgium.
Jan Caubergh was a Belgian serial killer. In 1966, he received 25 years of forced labour for his participation in a robbery in which his gang shot a nurse who was severely maimed and later committed suicide. In 1977 he was released on parole.
On 29 May 2018, Benjamin Herman, a prisoner on temporary leave from prison, stabbed two female police officers, took their guns, shot and killed them and a civilian in Liège, Belgium. The gunman took a woman hostage before he was killed by police. The attacker had since 2017 been suspected of having been radicalised in prison after converting to Islam, and was reported to be part of the entourage of a prison Islamist recruiter. The method of the attack was said by investigators to match and be specifically encouraged by the Islamic State which claimed the attack. Prosecutors say they are treating the attacks as "terrorist murder". The attack is treated as "jihadist terrorism" by Europol.
The Revolutionary Front for Proletarian Action was a Belgian far-left terrorist organisation.