Authorities have identified Ibrahim el-Bakraoui as potentially one of the two suicide bombers who struck at Brussels Airport on Tuesday morning.
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Notable among the questions were those raised by Turkey’s announcement it had warned Belgium previous year that one of the Brussels attackers, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, had been flagged as a “foreign terrorist fighter”.
Prosecutors announced a direct connection between the Brussels bombings that killed 31 people and injured 270 others and last year’s attacks on Paris, which appear to have been carried out by the same Islamic State network. The man to the left of him is Najim Laachraoui, who has been tentatively identified as the second airport bomber.
An undated photo of Salah Abdeslam.
While Belgium lowered its threat level, “the danger has not gone away”, said Paul Van Tigchelt, the head of the terror assessment authority. The fourth suspect seen in airport footage fled the scene and is at large.
Abdeslam evaded police in two countries for four months before his capture, and the attackers in Brussels may have rushed their plot because they felt authorities closing in.
It comes as security services are already scouring the country for another of the suspected killers, dubbed “the man in white”.
European ministers are holding a crisis meeting in Brussels to discuss their response to this week’s bombings.
In a suicide note found by Belgian police on a discarded laptop, Ibrahim El Bakraoui apparently wrote in French that he was in “a bad situation” and that, if he did not act immediately, he would end up in a prison cell “like him”.
Meanwhile, police have a fresh lead in their investigation of the Brussels terrorist attacks: a computer belonging to one of the suicide bombers, containing a despairing message described as a “will”. Now Belgian media are reporting he may have died in the attack.
Aside from the Bakraoui brothers, the identities of the attackers – and even the number of attackers – have not been definitively determined.
“We don’t have to be proud about what happened”, Justice Minister Koen Geens said of the government’s failures to halt the attacks.
Rob Wainwright, chief of Europol, has suggested that there were 5,000 people across Europe who became radicalized and went to the Middle East to fight.
And they have confirmed the Brussels bombings, which Islamic State has claimed responsibility for, were linked to the Paris attacks in November.
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Intelligence officials also indicated earlier on Wednesday that the terrorist group Daesh, also known as IS/Islamic State, has at least 400 trained fighters spread across Europe waiting to launch similar attacks.
