A man has shot dead two police officers and a civilian in the eastern Belgian city of Liège.
The gunman took a female cleaner hostage at a school before being killed by police. Two other police officers were also injured.
The man's motive is not yet clear but the incident is being treated as terrorism.
Police sources quoted in local media said the man was heard shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest" in Arabic).
Belgian broadcaster RTBF said the gunman was let out from prison on temporary release on Monday where he had been serving time on drug offenses. It said that he may have been radicalised while in jail.
The shooting unfolded late morning on Tuesday near a cafe in the city centre.
Update: 16:56 UTC
More recent reporting states:
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/29/europe/liege-shooting-intl/index.html
The incident occurred at around 10:30 a.m. when an assailant stabbed two policewomen from behind, before stealing their service weapons and using them on the officers, Liege Prosecutor Philippe Dulieu said at a news conference on Tuesday.
After killing the two officers, the attacker continued walking through the street and opened fire on a parked vehicle, fatally wounding the driver inside, Dulieu added.
The gunman also killed a 22-year-old male car passenger on the Boulevard d'Avory, before taking a female cleaner hostage at a nearby high school.
She was released when police shot dead the attacker, who has been named by local media as Belgian national Benjamin Herman.
See also, thanks to C0lo:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:48PM (5 children)
Sociopathy [wordpress.com] What personality traits would attract a Western born convict to convert to Islam? Where else do we see anti-social behaviours? [thehill.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:14PM (4 children)
Doesn't sound like you're the same AC. But I wasn't speaking of a single person, but questioning what was the point of the label of "mental illness". Are we supposed to be treating several billion people for the mental illness of being religious?
Second, sociopathy? Big whoop. That word is so devalued it's lost its meaning.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday May 29 2018, @05:44PM (3 children)
Let's just start with acknowledging, which will help.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 30 2018, @01:49AM (2 children)
Let's look at the assertion again.
It's not just some name-calling, but a call to action. We need to do something about religion, and that something is to "treat" it like a mental illness. There's a huge range of treatment options from self-help books to forced hospitalization (possibly with exotic treatments like electroshock therapy or medication), some which are economically impossible at present with billions of people affected - one would need serious AI to psychoanalyze a few billion people at once.
But there is this bit of nuance before one gets to treatment options. Namely, what is mental illness in the first place. We've gotten away from speaking of mental illness as merely being abnormal (which would be utter fail in the case of religion since that tends to be normal behavior!). So we're left with the idea that mental illness is any mental behavior that causes harm to the beholder or company and doesn't go away quickly on its own. If you get dumped and mope and act up over the weekend, you're not mentally ill. If you're still behaving this way, five years later with numerous bits of evidence that it's causing you and anyone around you harm, you are mentally ill.
Ok, so that's what my idea of mentally ill is. So a bunch of people with closed minds sure looks like mental illness. They're causing harm to themselves and others, check, with those attitudes. Then we move on to treatment. The point of treatment is to make things better not worse. For example, it's not a success, if your treatment turns a normal religious person into an ax murderer for J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. Sorry, Slacktarians, it just isn't.
So the treatment has to improve things. And that's where we get to the chief problem. The primary purpose of religion is to cope with death and a universe with infinite capacity for unfairness. Remove religion, and they'll still need to cope. You need to replace the old crutch with a better one in order for treatment to work. Good luck on that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:37AM (1 child)
The purpose of religion is for people who know better to gain power over the credulous. All religious leaders are evil, and all believers are victims.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 30 2018, @02:49AM
And I explained what was in it for the credulous. You can't understand religion, if you don't understand why it works.