BRUSSELS - SIX people were charged by Belgian prosecutors with belonging to a terrorist group on Friday after they were arrested in a series of raids before the start of an EU summit in Brussels.

'Five men and a woman have been charged with membership of a terrorist organisation and have been placed in preventive detention,' Lieve Pellens, a prosecutors' office spokesman, told AFP.

The six were among a group of 14 people suspected of being members of the Al-Qaeda network picked up on Thursday morning during raids by anti-terror police centred on Brussels as well as the eastern city of Liege.

News of the arrests was released hours before heads of government from the 27 states in the European Union gathered in the Belgian capital for a summit.

The spokesman however said there was no evidence to suggest that the EU summit had been singled out by those arrested.

'There is nothing that allows us to say that the European summit was being targeted,' she said.

'We don't know if the target was in Belgium or elsewhere.' Ms Pellens named the woman as Malika al-Aroud, whose first husband was killed in a 2001 suicide attack against Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance which was battling Afghanistan's then ruling Taleban movement. -- AFP