Belgian police were on Thursday hunting for a third man filmed with two Islamic State suicide bombers at Brussels airport as evidence piled up that the same jihadist network was involved in the deadly Paris attacks last November.
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Highlighting the threat, French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said police had arrested a suspect in the Paris area who was in “the advanced stages” of a plot to attack the nation.
The first official said Ibrahim El Bakraoui’s initial deportation in July had been based on police suspicions that he was a militant fighter, but no crime was committed in Turkey, describing his expulsion as an “administrative deportation”. ISIS has claimed responsibility for both attacks.
Friday’s detentions come after police detained six people late Thursday during several house searches in Brussels, including in the districts of Schaerbeek and Jette.
Prosecutors said Wednesday that Ibrahim, 30, who appeared in the center of an airport surveillance image, detonated a bomb at the airport while Khalid, 27, blew himself up in the city’s subway system.
Three of the terrorists, who killed 31 people at Brussels Airport and a downtown metro stop on Tuesday, lived in an apartment in the same neighborhood.
Ibrahim El Bakraoui was one of three identified suspected suicide bombers who hit the airport and a metro train in the worst terrorist attack in Belgian history.
Earlier in the day, Belgian police arrested seven people and Germany arrested two in investigations into Islamic State suicide bombings in Brussels.
The prosecutor also linked Laachraoui to November’s Paris carnage in which 130 people died, saying his DNA was found on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth discovered at the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people were killed.
They also believe Abdeslam escaped from Paris and headed back across the Belgian border in the hours after the attacks.
Prime Minister Charles Michel refused to accept the resignations of his ministers.
One of the attackers dubbed the “man in white” and pictured at the airport moments before twin explosions ripped through the building remains at large.
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The suspect arrested in Brussels on Friday is believed to have been in possession of a bag containing bomb parts.
