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| 2 Brussels Suicide Bombers Are Identified by State News Media | 2 Brussels Suicide Bombers Are Identified by State News Media |
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| BRUSSELS — The two suicide bombers who carried out the deadly attacks on Tuesday at Brussels Airport have been identified as brothers who were already known to the authorities, state news media reported on Wednesday. | BRUSSELS — The two suicide bombers who carried out the deadly attacks on Tuesday at Brussels Airport have been identified as brothers who were already known to the authorities, state news media reported on Wednesday. |
| The brothers were identified as Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 30, whom the police had been searching for since the March 15 raid on an apartment in the Brussels district of Forest, the radio station RTBF reported, citing police sources. A third attacker has not been publicly identified and is still at large. | |
| Khalid el-Bakraoui is believed to have rented that apartment, under a false name, as well as one in Charleroi. | |
| That raid turned up fingerprints belonging to Salah Abdeslam, who was taken into custody on Friday and is believed to be the sole surviving member of the team directly involved in the deadly attacks in and around Paris in November. | That raid turned up fingerprints belonging to Salah Abdeslam, who was taken into custody on Friday and is believed to be the sole surviving member of the team directly involved in the deadly attacks in and around Paris in November. |
| Ibrahim el-Bakraoui was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2010 after shooting at police officers following an attempted robbery of a currency exchange office. | |
| In 2011, Khalid el-Bakraoui was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted carjackings; at the time of his arrest, he had been in possession of assault rifles. | |
| The attacks on the airport and a subway station in Brussels that left at least 30 dead came a day after the Belgian authorities identified a man suspected of being an accomplice of Mr. Abdeslam and enlisted the public’s help in finding him. | |
| The man was identified as Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian citizen who went to Syria in February 2013. Mr. Laachraoui, using the name Soufiane Kayal, was one of two men using fake Belgian identification cards who were with Mr. Abdeslam in a Mercedes on Sept. 9 as they passed through a checkpoint between Hungary and Austria. | |
| Speaking on La Première radio, Interior Minister Jan Jambon said that police raids would continue and that the threat status would remain at its highest level, 4. | |
| “There are many hypotheses to put on the table,” he said. “It’s up to investigators to sort out fact from fiction” | |
| Mr. Jambon discounted speculation that the attacks were reprisals for the arrest of Mr. Abdeslam, saying it was unlikely that terrorists “could have launched attacks of a scale seen yesterday in two, three days.” | |
| Speaking later to RTL radio, Mr. Jambon said it was unlikely that the attacks could have been avoided if Belgium had been at the highest threat level instead of Level 3, which was imposed after the Paris attacks. | |
| “We were at Level 3, that means the probability is enormously elevated,” he said, adding that Belgium had “everything possible in place to avoid a catastrophe like what happened yesterday, like other countries.” | |
| “A zero risk is not going to happen. “ | |
| “Level 4 is when we have information that an attack will occur at a certain moment, in a certain place,” he said. “We did not have that information.” | |
| Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, told RTBF that the apparent link between the Bakraoui brothers and Mr. Abdeslam suggested that the Brussels attacks were not the work of another active terrorist cell. | |
| He suggested that, from a security perspective, this could mitigate the current threat. |