Drone sightings halt flights at major European cargo airport in Belgium

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BRUSSELS (AP) — Flights out of one of Europe’s biggest cargo airports were briefly suspended after drones were spotted, an airport official said Friday, an incident that comes amid a spate of incidents around Belgium in recent weeks.

Christian Delcourt, the head of communications for Liege airport, said drones forced a sequence of flight interruptions between 9 p.m. Thursday and 1 a.m. Friday, and again between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Friday, when full operations resumed.

Dozens of flights at Belgium’s main international airport in Brussels were canceled on Wednesday after drone sightings on Tuesday night forced it to close temporarily, prompting Prime Minister Bart De Wever to convene emergency government talks.

It was the first time that the airport in Brussels was shut down by drones. The incidents come after a series of unidentified drone flights over the weekend near a military base where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored.

More drones were spotted near the base, Kleine-Brogel, on Wednesday evening.

Little new emerged from Thursday’s emergency talks, although Defense Minister Theo Francken said a decision was taken to get the National Air Safety Center at Beauvechain air base in eastern Belgium fully operational by January 1.

“This center will ensure better monitoring and protection of Belgian airspace, and prepare Belgium for future challenges in air safety,” Francken said in a post on social media.

NATO declined to say whether drones had been spotted near its headquarters in Brussels, its military HQ in Mons, southern Belgium, or other alliance-linked facilities across the country.

In recent months, drone incidents across Europe have forced airports to suspend flights temporarily. Mysterious drone flights over the airspace of European Union member countries in recent months have alarmed the public and elected officials.

Russia has been blamed in some cases, but Belgium has not said who has been operating the drones. Francken has said that he believed that some incidents were part of “a spying operation” that could not have been done by amateurs.

Belgium also hosts the headquarters the EU, as well as Europe’s biggest financial clearinghouse holding tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian assets. Many EU countries want to use those assets as collateral to provide loans to Ukraine, but Belgium has so far resisted.

De Wever, the prime minister, warned EU leaders last month that Russia might retaliate if the money is confiscated. EU leaders are due to discuss the issue again at a summit in Brussels next month.