BRUSSELS — A gunman was killed Tuesday after he fatally shot two police officers and a civilian and then took a hostage at a school in the Belgian city of Liège, officials said. No students were injured.
Belgian prosecutors said they were investigating the attack in Liège, a provincial city of about 200,000 in eastern Belgium, as a terrorist incident.
The assailant, who has not been publicly identified, attacked two police officers from behind about 10:30 a.m. with a knife, stabbed them several times in the back, took their weapons, and used them to shoot and kill the officers, a prosecutor said at a news conference.
He also shot and killed a young man sitting in a parked car near a cafe, Aux Augustins, in central Liège, before fleeing on foot. He then took a female cleaner hostage in the nearby Atheneum Léonie de Waha school, a public institution with several hundred students between the ages of 3 and 18.
The police moved in, prompting the gunman to open fire, wounding two more police officers before he was killed. The cleaner was not injured and the students were brought to a nearby park and another public school building. The area around the cafe and the school was sealed off.
“The students are in safety,” Hervé Jamar, the governor of the province of Liège, who is responsible for overall security cooperation in the region, said on Twitter. “The individual has been neutralized.”
Belgium is still on alert after attacks by a Belgian-based cell of the Islamic State group that killed scores of people in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in 2016.
Liège was the site of a similar attack in 2011, when a gunman killed four people and wounded many more before shooting himself.
“Our thoughts are with the victims of this horrible act,” Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon said on Twitter. “We are in the process of working out exactly what is happening.”
Belgium’s crisis center said a security cordon had been placed around parts of Liège and it urged people to avoid the area.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which takes charge of terrorism-related investigations, is now looking into the matter.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.