Investigators are focusing on whether CCTV footage captured moments before the airport blasts shows two of the three suspected terrorists wearing single gloves to secrete detonators.
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Federal Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw told reporters Wednesday that Ibrahim El Bakraoui, 29, and another as yet unidentified suicide bomber attacked the airport.
Police raided an apartment in the borough of Schaerbeek, where they uncovered another bomb, an Islamic State flag and bomb-making chemicals.
On Wednesday he was named by Belgium media as Najim Laachraoui, who was already wanted by police inconnection with the Paris attacks.
The brothers, ages 27 and 30, were known to police prior to the attacks, the news outlet reports.
The incident came days after a suspect in the Paris terror attacks of last November, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in the Belgian city of Molenbeek.
The cause of the explosions is unknown.
In a statement, the Belgian FA KBVB said: “We had been in contact with the Portuguese for much of Tuesday and consulted several different security authorities, although understandably they have been absorbed with more urgent matters”.
Among those from the US wounded in the attack were three Mormon missionaries, a USA service member identified by the Associated Press as an Air Force lieutenant colonel, his wife and their four children.
“Bombers sometimes do really odd things”, he says, citing one investigation in which his team found sulfur at the site of an explosion, which didn’t contribute to the explosiveness of the blast.
Explosions, at least one likely caused by a suicide bomber, rocked the Brussels airport and subway system Tuesday, prompting a lockdown of the Belgian capital and heightened security across Europe. The Brussels airport announced that it will remain closed to passenger flights for at least another day, right up to the start of the busy Easter weekend.
A subsequent airport search yielded two more unexploded devices, which were destroyed by police.
Authorities had been scrambling to identify all three men, who were seen pushing luggage carts through the Brussels airport in a photo distributed by law enforcement.
That extremists were able to hit high-profile targets in Brussels, capital of the European Union, just months after IS group militants killed 130 people in Paris, raises fresh questions about the continent’s ability to prevent terrorism.
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“Now ISIS will have gotten wind of that fact, and if they fear that whatever human intelligence he has about the active networks in Europe will be given to European officials, they might have… accelerated any plans that they had for forthcoming terror attacks”.
