A senior member of President Obama’s national security team said U.S. and Belgian authorities have no indication of a broader plot on Belgian nuclear facilities despite finding a terrorist suspect’s secretly recorded video of a Belgian nuclear official.
“Certainly the video footage is of concern and suggests there is at least some interest by” the Islamic State in nuclear materials and facilities, Laura Holgate, a senior member of Obama’s National Security Council who specializes in weapons of mass destruction terrorism and threat reduction, told reporters Thursday afternoon.
“But we don’t have any indication that it was part of a broader planning to acquire nuclear materials, and we don’t have any information that a broader plot exists,” she said during a conference call previewing the Nuclear Security Summit the president is convening in Washington Thursday and Friday.
Holgate said the United States and Belgium have been working closely over the years on nuclear security issues and cited “extensive cooperation” on nuclear security, specifically mentioning efforts to reduce the amount of enriched uranium at the site where the Belgian nuclear facility official in question worked.
“We stand ready to help the Belgians in any way should they require or desire to cooperate more deeply on the issues,” she said.
In February, after the Paris terrorist attacks, Belgian security services found 10 hours of secretly recorded video showing an unnamed Belgian nuclear official coming and going from his home. The authorities found the footage while searching the home of Mohamed Bakkali, a suspect in the Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks.
Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said at the time that his country’s intelligence authorities had determined there was a threat “to the person in question, but not the nuclear facilities,” according to The Independent.
Citing knowledgeable sources, the British paper reported that investigators thought the suspected terrorists had hoped to kidnap the nuclear official and use him to access secure areas of a nuclear facility in Mol, a city in northern Belgium. Authorities suspected the terrorists were trying to obtain enough radioactive material to make a “dirty bomb.”
Just hours after suicide bombs ripped through Belgium’s international airport and a metro station in central Brussels last week, the government evacuated the nuclear facility.
Part of this week’s nuclear summit will focus on how countries can better secure their nuclear facilities “so that terrorists aren’t able to acquire them,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters Thursday.
In addition to broader nuclear-related issues such as the Iran deal and efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, the summit, Rhodes said, will be focused on “denying access to the most dangerous materials and going on offense against ISIS broadly.”
