Two former inmates at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay have been arrested in Belgium on charges of belonging to a group suspected of recruiting jihadists for Syria, prosecutors said Friday.

The pair were arrested early Thursday in connection with a burglary at an apartment near the northern Belgian port city of Antwerp, a spokesman for the prosecutor, Jean Pascal Thoreau, told AFP.

Burundian security forces crushed anti-government demonstrations, including shooting protesters running away from them, to silence those opposed to President Pierre Nkurunziza bid for a third-term, a rights group said Thursday.

"Burundian authorities sought not just to disperse demonstrations, but to punish protesters for expressing their political views," Amnesty International said in a report, titled "Braving Bullets."

The Belgian government said Wednesday that it has in recent months helped 244 Christians to escape from Syria and move to Belgium with refugee status, most of them families with children.

The humanitarian operation began in May to "save" some of the most vulnerable people in Aleppo, Syria's second city where Islamist rebels are gaining ground, Foreign Minister Didier Reynders told a press conference in Brussels.

Turkey on Saturday lashed out at Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel for recognizing the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces during World War I as genocide.

Michel, the youngest prime minister in Belgium's history, said during a parliamentary session on Wednesday that the 1915 mass killings "must be viewed as a genocide."

Russian government assets in France and Belgium including bank accounts have been frozen in a row over compensation for shareholders of defunct oil giant Yukos, officials and a claimant representative said Thursday.

In France, accounts in around 40 banks were frozen along with eight or nine buildings, Tim Osborne, executive director of the main shareholder GML, told AFP.

Belgian authorities on Monday charged two people in connection with a probe into a Chechen extremist group suspected of seeking to recruit jihadists to fight in Syria, federal prosecutors said.

The two were among 16 people detained for questioning in 21 raids that took place Monday mainly in the Flemish-speaking Flanders region, but the other 14 were later released, a prosecutor's spokesman told AFP. 

Belgian prosecutors have launched an investigation into allegations of widespread surveillance by Germany, which is alleged to have helped the U.S. spy on Berlin's allies in Europe.

"The inquiry's objective is to learn about the exact nature of the acts that may have been committed and could be prosecuted," Jean-Pascal Thoreau, a spokesman for federal prosecutors, said Sunday.

Belgium has launched an investigation into claims of widespread espionage by Germany, which is accused of helping the U.S. spy on Berlin's closest allies in Europe, a minister said Friday.

"If it should emerge that the reports of wide-scale eavesdropping by the German secret services are correct, Germany will have to provide an explanation," Telecoms Minister Alexander de Croo said on Friday.

Protesters in Burundi on Monday defied government orders to end demonstrations against President Pierre Nkurunziza's controversial bid for a third term Monday, as Belgium suspended key funding for the elections.

Hundreds of opposition supporters demonstrated on the streets of the capital Bujumbura, despite the security services ripping down barricades set up during days of protests.

An Israeli court sentenced an Iranian-born Belgian to seven years in prison Tuesday after convicting him of spying for Tehran posing as a businessman.

Ali Mansouri was arrested at Ben Gurion airport in 2013 as he attempted to leave the country carrying photographs of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and other sites, Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service said.