By Richard Cottrell

Contributing writer for End the Lie

A body suspected to be the gunman who opened fire on a square packed with children and Christmas shoppers in the eastern Belgian city of Liege, lies on the ground on December 13, 2011 (Photo credit: MICHEL KRAKOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

A confused and probably mindless individual has just been accused by the Belgian authorities of killing five people and injuring another 122 at a traditional Christmas street fair in the city of Liege.

The man, purportedly armed with a powerful automatic rifle, first mounted a staging platform that gave him a perfect view of Saint-Lambert square, packed as usual with seasonal gift-buyers.

The police accounts state that he then opened fire and began to throw grenades. Allegedly, splinters from one of these killed him – conveniently – outright. He was not, the authorities gushed, shot by the police. Perish the thought.

There is every sign that he carefully and cold-bloodedly selected his victims, aiming slowly and patiently. In fact, it was exactly like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian recently judged insane and unfit to plead after for killing 69 campers on the holiday camp island Utøya not far from the capital, Oslo, on July 22nd this year.

Breivik was portrayed as a lone gunman possessed by hatred of Islam and other strange thoughts buzzing in an obviously crowded head.

Rinse and repeat.  Belgian officials have named the Liege gunman as Nordine Amrani, a 33-year-old born to a Moroccan family living in the country.

The charge sheet read impressively: convictions for offences involving possession of illegal weapons, drugs and sexual assaults.

In short, the stereotype patsy the police had under surveillance, exactly like Breivik in Norway before the Utøya Island shooting and the supposed car bomb that he placed in the Oslo government district the same day that killed an additional eight people.

Dissatisfied with the impressive roll call of offences, Amrani was then accused posthumously as the lead suspect in the murder of a 45 year old charwoman who cleaned house for one of Armani’s neighbors, on the same day as the attack. She was found shot in the head on the morning of Tuesday, December 13th.

A rape investigation is presumably intended to add to his guilt while producing useful supporting DNA evidence.

Just about everything is wrong with this story.

A man with a string of offences involving guns, drugs and sex attacks, was clearly the kind of suspect that the police would tail on an automatic basis. But no, instead, he somehow manages to get hold of a high powered rifle and more to the point, grenades.

Yet this is a petty criminal, by and large. Where and how and why would he acquire access to grenades? The answer is: military stores.

What were his motives? Presumably some document will soon be found to explain that, like Breivik’s famous rambling testament in which he weds the right way to grow sugar beet (as a professional market gardener) to his repulsion for Islam and admiration for Israel.

Let’s jump back 30 years. The time leap will help us to the probable answer to these mysteries.

In the early 1980s, a group of heavily armed gunmen terrorized supermarkets and other shops in the Brabant region near Brussels.

The gunmen fired at random at bystanders during a series of robberies between 1982 and 1985, killing 28 people and injuring many more.

The victims included unfortunate shoppers who were cut down in cold blood by machine gunners in busy supermarkets and parking lots.

The official Belgian parliamentary inquiry rudely dismissed that notion that criminals were responsible.

The robbery label anyway failed to stick when a sack crammed with stolen cash was found tossed in a stream. Robbers are rarely that generous.

Instead the official parliamentary investigators concluded the perpetrators were Neofascists associated with Belgian secret services.

In 2006, the guns and the ammunition used in the Brabant massacres were finally traced, to the supposedly defunct branch of the NATO Belgian stay-behind army of secret soldiers called “the Special Intervention Squadron” – the one known within the Gladio command structure as the “Diana [from the Hunter] Organization.”

This unit was quietly reformed under a different name in 2008.

As I explain in my forthcoming book on Gladio (see below) the original Diana was a top secret assassination squad and there is no reason to believe that its successor has any different duties.

The purpose of the Brabant attacks (and others in the city of Nouvelle about the same time) was expressly political.

Belgium in the 1980s was in a state of continual political ferment. NATO, whose headquarters are close to Brussels, feared a dramatic lurch to the Left in its own back yard.

The attacks were supposed to dramatize the impression of a civil insurgency. The reasoning went that voters would flock for security to the arms of a safe Right wing government.

In wider terms, this became known throughout Europe as the Strategy of Tension.

So what are the motives today for a repeat Gladio exercise in Liege? They are two-fold.

First, Belgium is on the edge of breaking apart. The country has just acquired a government after a European record of 547 days since the last election to establish a viable coalition.

The causes are essentially linguistic friction between the Flemish speaking and French speaking regions.

No-one can be sure how long this fragile administration will last, but it is probably not very long. There just isn’t enough political glue to do the job.

The country also suffers severe economic problems particularly in the areas of gross public debts that challenge the euro currency rules.

The collapse of Belgium as a political entity would be a huge embarrassment to the European Union, which also has its central home in Brussels.

The European Council’s president is the Belgian political retread Herman von Rompuy. He is busily, not to say obsessively, involved in trying to push through fast-track European currency union on the back of the wholly artificial and contrived euro currency crisis.

Liege lies in the French canton of Belgium. Traditionally the French speakers, or Walloons as they are called, are more sympathetic to the unitary Belgian state.

The atrocity in Saint-Lambert Square is subliminally intended to cement support for the infant government which has just been formed after such a prolonged nativity.

Secondly, the attack concentrates attention once again on the presence of 450,000 immigrants or long term residents of Islamic origin.

They have been the object of plotting the creation of Sharia law within the country, as a first step to full recognition as an independent linguistic and racial force with the federal state.

The fact that the accused terrorist is of Moroccan descent fits the necessity to scapegoat Belgium’s Islamic minority perfectly.

There were huge riots in Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest city renowned as the diamond capital of Europe, on 29^th November 2002.

The provocation was the murder of a quiet young Moroccan supposedly by a mentally deficient neighbor. Again, the retarded patsy has his moment of fame.

The media and the authorities seized on the incident to claim that Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist heading the Arab-European League, which is based in Belgium, deliberately incited the subsequent violence.

The man the newspapers called the Malcolm X of Belgium was never charged, kept under house arrest for a few days, and then quietly released to do as he pleased.

We are in the same territory after the atrocity in Liege. Propaganda reaped its rewards.

The following days will see the patient construction of the case against Nordine Amrani, the Belgian Anders Breivik.

By no coincidence at all, a similar attack occurred in Italy on exactly the same day.

The Italian authorities blamed a “far-right militant” for the death of two Senegalese street vendors in a shooting spree in the historic city of Florence.

Witnesses said they saw the purportedly white assailant, 50-year-old called Gianluca Casseri, casually get out of a car and then calmly aim three shots with a pistol  that killed two vendors on the spot and seriously  wounded a third.

Accounts state that he then shot himself, or was shot by the police. Quite probably, the latter.

The sum of similarities between Liege and Florence are too great to be ascribed to the sudden rash acts by disturbed people

As everyone knows, Italy has recently come under the rule of a non-elected civilian technocrat government which is imposing a stiff austerity program.

Resentment of immigrants from Africa particularly is also the source of immense resentment in the country. The linkage is not difficult to make.

We are back to the Gladio-style Strategy of Tension and the need to muster strong support from both Left and Right flanks of the country behind a Right wing authority pressing unpopular reforms.

My advice is to expect more of the same.

UPDATE: The latest reports from the scene speak of witnesses describing two and possibly three gunmen firing assault weapons and throwing grenades.

If the experience of Norway is anything to go by, these reports of additional shooters will be totally disregarded by the authorities and, under pressure, the mainstream media.

Anders Behring Breivik constantly spoke of “we” when explaining his actions. Survivors of the holiday island masacre not only insisted there was a second gunman but described him very clearly.

The Norwegian law enforcement agencies and the courts ignored this evidence completely, clearly because it compromised the image of Breivik as the lone killer. I think we shall see a repeat performance in Belgium.

The same “withdrawn and solitary figure” is being followed in Italy after the attacks on Senegalese street traders on December 14th. The accused man Gianluca Casseri (50) is portrayed as a loner conveniently working as an editor of a magazine specializing in racy horror stories.

He is also said to have flirted with a rather eccentric group called Casa Pound (literally Pound House, named after the poet and iconoclastic thinker Ezra Pound, long been adopted as an icon by far right movements). The Casa is based in Rome.

The Casa Pound people are actually equivocal about Italy’s fascist past, and the former dictator Benito Mussolini. But they are firmly anti-immigration, so they are now tarred with the atrocity in Florence. This is a very clear political bonus.

The reports circulated by the authorities that Casseri was an active neofascist writer are so far entirely unsubstantiated.

His alleged weapon of choice, a .357 magnum revolver, is interesting. The famous “one shot stopper” has long been issued to Italian special forces involved in highly comnfidential under cover opetrations.

Casseri was purportedly cornered in a car park. He shot himself in the mouth before he could be arrested. Dead men tell no tales.

UPDATE 2:
Descriptions of the carnage in Liege are becoming more complex and quite obviously seething with planted disinformation.

Quotes from unnamed bystanders broadcast on national TV refer to the prime suspect holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Well, it would take an eagle eye to spot that essential detail in the midst of all the mayhem and bloodshed.

What are the chances of such an expert on military ordinance finding himself in the Christmas market that morning, and moreover apparently right next to the gunman?

Unless I am much mistaken there is an inference here of Islamic immigrants in Belgium getting weapons from Russia.

Next, Amrani is reported as hurling a grenade at a bus queue, before shooting himself in the head.

Was that with the “Kalashnikov” by any chance or a different weapon, like a revolver?

Or was he shot by a third party, an expert marksman aiming from a distance?

The death toll from these tragic events, which have obviously ruined the spirit of the Christmas season in this small country, has now risen to six, including small children.

This is the standard reprise of the Strategy of Tension during the les années de plomb – the years of lead – that terrorized Belgians in the 1980′s.

Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is coming in January of 2012 from Progressive Press.

Edited by Madison Ruppert

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