A manhunt is underway for one of the Brussels airport attackers who was recorded on a surveillance video and had fled the scene. “The identification is still ongoing”, he said, referring to man caught on CCTV entering Maelbeek station with presumed bomber Khalid El Bakraoui.
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The younger brother of Najim Laachraoui has also been speaking, describing his sibling as “a nice boy – especially intelligent”.
Turkey said it had warned Belgium that it had flagged El Bakraoui as a “foreign terrorist fighter”. But other Turkish officials said he was released from Dutch custody due to lack of evidence of involvement in extremism.
Laachraoui travelled to Hungary with him previous year, while the Bakraoui brothers rented – as well as the Belgian safe house used by the Paris killers – a flat in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels where Abdeslam himself hid for three weeks after the attacks. He was shot in the leg during his arrest.
Abdeslam, arrested last week in Brussels and initially cooperative, had “exercised his right to silence” and said nothing when interviewed after Tuesday’s bombings according to prosecutors in Brussels. “So he saw police officers after the attacks”, Mary said.
Investigators are convinced the same jihadist network was involved in the November Paris attacks.
But Geens added that “such events have also happened in nations with the best intelligence services in the world”, pointing to the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Abdeslam, 26, a French citizen who grew up in Brussels’ heavily immigrant Molenbeek neighborhood, slipped through police fingers on multiple occasions.
Belgium’s interior and justice ministers have both offered their resignations but they were rejected by the prime minister.
Belgium is holding three days of national mourning. A spokesman for the Islamic extremists said: “Fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martyrdom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek Metro station”.
Brussels Airport is expected to remain closed until Monday.
RTBF cited unidentified sources saying the person arrested had not responded to police orders and had been found to be in possession of a suitcase containing explosive substances. He is now among a handful of people Belgian investigators want to interview in relation to the ongoing investigation into the airport and subway attacks.
“It’s much easier to get into Europe than to get into the United States for example because of geography”, said Daniel Benjamin, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism.
Asked whether he tries to understand his brother, he said: “It’s over, I try to turn the page”.
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He urged respect for “the victims we couldn’t pull out”.
