Brussels bomb alert was ‘false alarm’

A large police operation in the Belgian capital which lasted all afternoon was a false alarm, officials say.
Police were called following reports that a man was acting suspiciously and wearing a coat with wires protruding.
BBC stated that the operation has ended and the man was apparently a student of nuclear radiation at university in Brussels.
The city was on high alert ahead of Belgium’s National Day on Thursday. An attack in Nice on France’s Bastille Day last week left 84 people dead.
The bomb squad was called, shops evacuated and several streets closed.
“We got a call about someone acting suspiciously. Someone with a heavy winter coat – in these temperatures it’s very suspicious.
“And there were wires coming out of the coat too,” Christian De Coninck of Brussels police told Belgian TV. “We didn’t take any risks. The person was stopped and kept at a distance.”
It was 30C in Brussels on Wednesday afternoon.
Thirty-two people were killed in bomb attacks in Brussels earlier this year.
Last month, a man was arrested amid an anti-terror operation at a shopping centre in the city. Prosecutors said he was wearing a fake suicide belt containing salt and biscuits.