Belgian police arrested 14 people today suspected of links to a Belgian woman who carried out a suicide attack near Baghdad earlier this month.
Two of those arrested during raids concentrated in Brussels and Antwerp were Tunisians, three were Moroccans and the rest were Belgian nationals, a federal police spokesman said.
The 38-year-old woman blew herself up a few weeks ago in what security sources believe could be the first suicide attack in Iraq involving a European woman.
She has not been identified, but officials say she was born in Belgium of European origin and converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim.
De Standaardnewspaper quoted a US official in Iraq as saying the attack was carried out on November 9th and targeted a US military convoy south of Baghdad. No one was killed apart from the woman herself, it reported.
It added a Belgian passport was found on her body, along with papers which showed she had entered Iraq via Turkey.
Belgium, home to the European Union institutions and NATO, has suffered no attacks on its soil by Islamic militants. The country has large Arab and Muslim communities in some of its cities and is thought to have been used as a rear base for Islamic militants involved in terror plots.
Earlier this month, 13 men accused of belonging to an Islamic militant group blamed for bombings in Madrid and Casablanca went on trial in Brussels. They face charges of providing false papers, safe houses and logistical help to members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM), which is held responsible for the 2004 Madrid attacks on four commuter trains that killed 191 people.
European security services have been aware for some time of a trickle of fighters heading from the continent to join the insurgency in Iraq.
German federal police chief Joerg Ziercke referred earlier this month to estimates that "perhaps 200 young people are fighting in Iraq from European countries".
A French intelligence chief said in May that five young men from a single Paris district had died in Iraq, one in a suicide attack.
Spain arrested 16 suspected Islamist militants in June including 11 alleged followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda's leader in Iraq. It said many of the Zarqawi supporters had expressed the will to become "martyrs for Islam" there.