Brussels airport suicide bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui has left a rushed will in a trash can that said he did not know what to do as the police were hunting for him, Belgium’s federal prosecutor said on Wednesday.
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Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw identified Ibrahim El Bakraoui as one of the airport suicide bombers and his brother, Khalid El Bakraoui, as the man behind the deadly suicide blast about an hour later near the Maelbeek metro station.
“He left his bag with the biggest bomb in it which exploded later because it was so unstable”, Van Leeuw told a press conference, adding that police had found a massive stash of explosives in a Brussels apartment.
Speaking about a surveillance photo showing the three airport suspects, Van Leeuw said the culprit in the middle was Ibrahim El Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian born in Brussels.
Baby-faced Ibrahim, 30, one of two suicide bombers at the airport, had been handed a nine-year sentence in 2010 after a gunfight with police, according to local media. Belgian media reports that Laachraoui was arrested Wednesday. Caught in Marseille and extradited, he is now in Bruges high-security prison, as is Salah Abdeslam, who is fighting extradition to France over the Paris attacks.
She told MPs Britain must do more to support “vulnerable” countries and to counter the “poisonous and repugnant” ideology of so-called Islamic State.
His expression of concern that he might be arrested likely was triggered by the recent arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, who police said has confessed to his role in the Paris attacks.
The El Bakraouis, who have a background in organized crime, the Guardian reported, were already on the run from police on suspicion one or both provided weapons and a hiding place linked to the Paris attacks in November.
At least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in the attacks, the prosecutor said. But a Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said the bomber was allowed to go free because Belgian authorities could not establish any ties to extremism. It is not clear if he helped prepare Tuesday’s attacks.
“Islamic State fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station in the center of the Belgian capital Brussels, a country participating in the coalition against the Islamic State”, the militant Islamist group said through an affiliated news agency, The New York Times reported. Traces of his DNA were found in houses used by the Paris attackers past year. Security forces stood guard around the neighborhood housing the headquarters of European Union institutions, as nervous Brussels residents began returning to school and work under a misty rain.
The November carnage in Paris is believed to have been planned in Brussels, where a handful of the attackers lived or had links. He remains unaccounted for by police since the Paris attacks and is known to have fought in Syria.
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The global soccer friendly between Belgium and Portugal set for next Tuesday has been called off.
