Brussels Police Officer Is Stabbed, Officials Say

A man attacked a police officer with a knife outside a police station in Brussels on Tuesday morning and another officer shot the assailant, officials said.

Both the injured officer and the attacker, whose name was not released, were hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening, said Ilse van de Keere, a spokeswoman for the Brussels police.

The suspect “is not known by our national terrorist watchdog agency and its databases,” Belgium’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, said in an interview on national radio. “According to our information he was detained in a psychiatric institution and recently released.”

According to local news reports, the man yelled “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” raising concerns about another Islamist terrorist attack in a city that has endured several of them.

Van de Keere said she was aware of those reports but did not know if they were correct.

“Now we are investigating what the motives of the suspect are, so it’s too soon to tell,” she said.

Jambon said the attack was not being treated as a terrorist incident.

The attack took place at 5:30 a.m. outside the central police station, near the Grand Place in the historic heart of the city.

In 2016, three suicide bombings struck Brussels on the same morning, two at the airport and one at a busy metro station, killing 32 people and injuring more than 300. The attackers were part of the same cell that had carried out the 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

Last year, a bomb detonated in a Brussels train station, but no one was seriously hurt.