The federal prosecutor’s office in Belgium said the arrests came during police searches in the Brussels neighbourhoods of Schaerbeek in the north and Jette in the west, as well as in the centre of the Belgian capital.
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Two of the three people who are thought to have took part in the Brussels Airport attack are presumed dead, Khalid’s brother Ibrahim El Bakraoui and ISIS bomb maker Najim Laachraoui.
Yesterday Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the brothers responsible for the attacks on Brussels Airport yesterday, was sent to the Netherlands in June previous year.
Mayor Bernard Clerfayt told state broadcaster RTBF that the police raid is linked to the investigation into this week’s Brussels suicide bombings and a new arrest in the Paris area.
Explosions have been heard and a suspect has been “neutralised” during an anti-terror operation by armed police in a Brussels suburb.
French newspaper Le Monde said it had based its report on the minutes of two hours of interrogation on March 19, the only questioning Abdeslam faced between his arrest a day earlier and the attacks three days later.
On Thursday, French police arrested a terror suspect who was in the “advanced stages” of a plot to attack the country.
Abdeslam, 26, said he was planning further attacks in Brussels, and links have emerged between him and the suspected Brussels assailants.
Both appeared to have been carried out by the same Belgium-based Islamic State cell.
One of those arrested in Germany had suspicious text messages on his mobile phone referencing Brussels.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has arrived in Brussels, where he is meeting with officials to discuss this week’s terrorist attack and offering his condolences to victims and their families.
The move follows reports that some of the Brussels attackers had video footage of a senior official working in Belgium’s nuclear industry.
Of the government’s failures to halt the attacks, Geens said: “We don’t have to be proud about what happened…We perhaps did things we should not have done”.
The Belgian daily De Standaard said on Friday police had arrested a man who was filmed by security cameras in the airport terminal next to two bombers who blew themselves up there.
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Police sources said Kriket had been found guilty in absentia in Brussels last July of being part of a network recruiting militants to Syria and sentenced to 10 years’ jail.
