German police officers guard a terminal at the Frankfurt airport. “I will ask the investigating magistrate not to oppose his departure”.
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Police sources said the raid was linked to Thursday’s arrest of a man who was plotting a terror attack in France.
Belgian federal prosecutors on Saturday (March 26) said they had charged three men, including a suspect Belgian media believe is a man captured on security footage with two suicide bombers at Brussels airport on Tuesday (March 22).
“We already knew that Khalid El Bakraoui blew himself up in the metro at Maelbeek station”. It is not clear whether that man was killed in the attack.
Prosecutors, who have not said how many people overall may have taken part in the bombings, did not immediately respond to the reports.
The long list of blunders by Belgian intelligence is putting pressure on the government and raising urgent questions across Europe about whether Tuesday’s attack in Brussels could have been prevented. Bombs exploded Tuesday at Brussels airport and one of the city’s metro stations, killing and wounding scores of people, as a European capital was again locked down amid heightened security threats.
Meanwhile, two men were reportedly arrested in Germany in connection with the Brussels attacks.
Travelling under the false name, Soufiane Kayal, Laachraoui was documented driving from Hungary into Austria in September in a auto driven by Salah Abdeslam, the prime suspect in the Paris attacks who was arrested in Brussels last week.
The first official said Ibrahim El Bakraoui’s initial deportation in July had been based on police suspicions that he was a militant fighter, but no crime was committed in Turkey, describing his expulsion as an “administrative deportation”.
“Police carried out two searches as part of a terrorism case linked to the arrest (near Paris) of Reda Kriket”, the prosecutor said in a statement on Friday.
The alleged logistics chief of those attacks was caught before the Brussels bombings, but Salah Abdeslam’s lawyer, Sven Mary, told CBS News the police had only interrogated him once.
Evidence obtained by the authorities shows that the same terrorist cell was behind the Paris attacks in November that killed more than 130 people and this week’s Brussels bombings, which claimed the lives of 31 people and injured over 270, the paper wrote. Several attackers were also killed.
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Belgium is holding three days of national mourning.
