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Brussels Attack Lapses Acknowledged by Belgian Officials Brussels Attack Lapses Acknowledged by Belgian Officials
(about 4 hours later)
BRUSSELS — Belgium’s justice and interior ministers acknowledged Thursday that the authorities had erred by not acting on Turkey’s request last year that they take custody of a Belgian citizen arrested for suspected terrorist activity. The man was one of the Islamic State suicide bombers in the devastating Brussels attacks. BRUSSELS — Top Belgian officials on Thursday acknowledged miscommunications and other errors in the prelude to the Brussels suicide bombings, as growing evidence of links to the Paris assaults by the Islamic State suggested that a wide network of trained attackers leading back to Syria is now rooted in Europe.
The acknowledgments by the justice minister, Koen Geens, and interior minister, Jan Jambon, were the first high-level Belgian admissions of blunder in the aftermath of the bombings on Tuesday. The attacks have exposed missteps by European security officials and police, just four months after the Islamic State’s assault on targets in Paris. The Belgian justice and interior ministers acknowledged that their departments should have acted on a Turkish alert about a convicted Belgian criminal briefly arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of terrorist activity, who turned out to be one of the suicide bombers. And the Belgian prosecutor’s office said that person’s brother — another suicide bomber — had been wanted since December in connection with the Paris attacks.
“What’s essential in the story is that with the passing on of the information from Turkey and with the passing on of the information within Belgium, we have been slower than one could have expected under those circumstances,” Mr. Geens said on Flemish television in Belgium. “So, the information was passed on, but we have not been diligent, or probably not diligent enough.” Taken together, they amounted to the first high-level acknowledgment that European officials could have done more to avert the bombings, and came amid other recriminations in the European Union about recurrent failures among its national police forces and intelligence services to share information.
Mr. Jambon told the newspaper Le Soir that there had been “two types of mistakes, at the level of the Justice Ministry and at the level of the liaison officer in Turkey, which involves the Interior and Justice ministries.” Even as investigators have collaborated in Belgium and France since the Paris attacks four months ago, which by all accounts were planned in Belgium, they were caught unaware by the Brussels attack on Tuesday, which killed 31 people and wounded 300 in the airport and a busy subway station.
Both ministers offered their resignations on Thursday, an implicit acknowledgment of responsibility for perhaps having failed to avert the bombings at the Brussels airport and a downtown subway station that left 31 people dead and 300 wounded. With Belgium at its maximum state of terrorist alert and numerous police raids underway, Prime Minister Charles Michel rejected the resignation offers. The investigators now say that at least three and probably four people played roles in both the Brussels and Paris assaults. With at least one suspect still missing and unidentified from the Brussels bombings, experts said it was likely that the attacks are not over.
But questions proliferated about what law enforcement authorities did — and failed to do— to thwart the bombers, who appeared to be part of the same Islamic State network that carried out the Paris attacks last November. “There seems to be more and more evidence that there are links between French commandos who had a role in Paris and Belgians who targeted the airport and the Maelbeek metro station,” said Didier Leroy, a researcher of militant jihadist networks at the Belgian Royal Military Academy and Brussels University. “There are fingerprints, there are some specific phone calls on the night of the Paris attacks.”
The most glaring lapse, which Turkey’s president first raised publicly on Wednesday, appeared to be Belgian officials’ inaction on a Turkish request last June that Belgium take custody of Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who had been arrested in Turkey as a suspected terrorist for trying to enter Syria. “Definitely there are other attacks to be feared and other individuals will emerge — we are in a long-term dynamic here,” he said.
Mr. Bakraoui, who had spent time in a Belgian prison for attempted robbery and shooting at a police officer, was one of two brothers identified as being among the three suicide bombers in Brussels. The Franco-Belgian network is part of the wider trend of European fighters in Syria and Iraq, estimated by security services to number 4,000 to 6,000. It is not clear how many have returned to Europe; while some officials estimate 10 percent, others have disputed that as exaggerated.
When Belgium did not act on the notification, Turkish officials said, they deported Mr. Bakraoui to the Netherlands at his request. The French and Belgian fighters, however, are especially close, said Nathalie Goulet, a member of the French Senate and a co-chairwoman of a committee that looked into jihadist networks in Europe.
Mr. Geens at first reacted to Turkey’s assertion by justifying Belgium’s inaction, saying on Wednesday that the suspect was a common criminal not known for terrorism. But on Thursday he was more self-critical. “We will find more connections, because I don’t believe in the lone wolf,” she said. “These people have the same training, the same national connection; they have long friendships and when they left for Syria they all went to the same place there because they are French speakers and that reinforced their connections and ability to work together.”
“There probably has not been a timely flow of information from Turkey to Belgium and from information inside Belgium,” the minister said. They were tied as well — much as gang members are — by lives of petty criminality and sometimes larger crimes, Mr. Leroy said.
It remains unclear why Belgian officials did not order Mr. Bakraoui re-incarcerated, since his mere presence in Turkey appeared to have violated terms of his release from prison. The Paris and Brussels plotters appear to have shared a bombmaker, Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who is widely reported as having been one of the suicide bombers at the Brussels Airport. Neither the Belgian prosecutor’s office nor Mr. Laachraoui’s family have confirmed his death.
The Justice Department of the Netherlands confirmed on Thursday that Mr. Bakraoui had been sent to Amsterdam from Istanbul last July 14, the same day it had been informed by Turkey’s Foreign Ministry in a “very urgent” notification message, but that the message did not explain the nature of the urgency and raised no alarms about him. Belgian law enforcement say Mr. Laachraoui, a trained electrical engineer, went to Syria in 2013. He was noted by the police in a routine check in September as he drove between Hungary and Austria with Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the lone surviving suspect of the Paris attacks, who was arrested in Belgium less than a week ago and who now says he wants to be returned to France. There were unconfirmed accounts on Thursday that Mr. Abdeslam may also have been planning to participate in the Brussels assault.
The connections between the deadly attacks are pointing investigators and terrorism experts toward the conclusion that there is a sprawling network of trained attackers that leads back to Syria but is rooted in Europe as well. Mr. Laachraoui was using the name Soufiane Kayal. He later rented a safehouse in Auvelais, south of Brussels, used by the Paris attackers as they were preparing. The authorities found traces of his DNA there.
At least three and probably four participants were active in both attacks. With at least one person still missing and unidentified from the Brussels bombings, it seems possible the attacks are not over. His DNA was found at another apartment in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels where the Paris attackers appear to have assembled some of their suicide vests, according to a statement from Frédéric Van Leeuw, the Belgian federal prosecutor. Traces of the explosive TATP were found in the apartment when it was raided in Schaerbeek, one of the heavily immigrant districts next door to Molenbeek, the home of three of the Paris attackers.
“There seems to be more and more evidence that there are links between French commandos who had a role in Paris and Belgians who targeted the airport and the Maelbeek metro station,” said Didier Leroy, a researcher on jihadist networks at the Belgian Royal Military Academy and Brussels University. “There are fingerprints, there are some specific phone calls on the night of the Paris attacks.” He and Mohamed Belkaid, another of the accomplices in the Paris attacks, traveled together to Belgium with Mr. Abdeslam, and are believed to have been on the phone with some of the Paris attackers as that assault was underway, perhaps directing or coaching them, according to Belgian media accounts.
“Definitely there are other attacks to be feared and other individuals will emerge — we are in a long-term dynamic here,” Mr. Leroy said. While prosecutors have not made public the identity of those on the phone in Belgium with the Paris attackers, the police have determined that at least two phones in Belgium were pinged by the Paris attackers.
Both the Paris and Brussels assailants appeared to have shared a bomb maker, Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who is widely reported as having been the second suicide bomber at the Brussels Airport on Tuesday. The Belgian prosecutor’s office has not confirmed his death saying “it is too early to say,” but European intelligence officials said he was dead. On Monday, barely 18 hours before the Brussels bombings, the Belgian authorities issued an all-points bulletin for Mr. Laachraoui, asking the public to call immediately if they saw him or knew his whereabouts. That alert came too late: The bombs were likely to have already been made and packed into suitcases — all that remained was to detonate them.
The Brussels attacks came less than a week after the police in Belgium captured Salah Abdeslam, believed to be the sole surviving participant in the Paris attacks last November that killed 130 people. Investigators have since linked him to some of the Brussels bombers. His lawyer, Sven Mary, told reporters at a court hearing in Brussels on Thursday that Mr. Abdeslam wanted to be extradited to France, reversing his earlier position. One man who figures in both Paris and Brussels, although his role remains mysterious, is Mr. Belkaid, 35, an Algerian.
Mr. Abdeslam was Europe’s most-wanted man until he was arrested on Friday in a raid in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighborhood where he grew up. It appears he was important enough for the attackers, or their directors in Syria, to have him travel across Europe — and possibly from Syria — to help in the attacks. It also seems he was designated to survive the Paris attacks since he was left behind in Belgium, although his next assignment was unclear.
Asked why Mr. Abdeslam had changed his mind, Mr. Mary said that his client understood “the case here is just a small piece,” and that he wanted to “explain himself in France.” Mr. Abdeslam has not spoken to investigators since the bombings in Brussels. He was a behind-the-scenes participant — at least until the gun battle that killed him on March 15 when he fought the Belgian police as they raided an apartment in the Forest section of Brussels. His rapid response to the arrival of the police at the apartment almost certainly helped the two other men in the house with him to flee. The two have not been identified and it is not clear if they are among those accomplices still alive.
Asked what his client had said about the attacks, Mr. Mary replied, “He didn’t say, because he didn’t know it.” Asked if Mr. Abdeslam had reacted to the attacks, Mr. Mary responded, “He had no reaction.” When Mr. Belkaid first surfaced in connection with the Paris attacks he was using the name Samir Bouzid, which was on the false identity papers he used as he drove across Europe with Mr. Abdeslam and Mr. Laachraoui. It took the police until this week to determine that his real name was Belkaid.
The federal prosecutor in Belgium said on Thursday that a day earlier, investigators had searched the homes of the Bakraoui brothers. He also said that an arrest warrant had been issued for Khalid el-Bakraoui on Dec. 11 by the judge investigating the Paris attacks. There appears to be a deep reserve in Belgium of people with the potential to become the next participants in a violent attack on civilians. The country’s security services maintain a list of 1,000 names that includes every potentially dangerous person with Belgian citizenship, said Mr. Leroy, the Royal Military Academy researcher. 
“I wouldn’t want him to clam up,” Mr. Mary said. “His clamming up would make us face other Zaventems and other Bataclans.” He was referring to the Belgian airport that was bombed and to the Paris concert hall where 90 people were killed by gunmen on Nov. 13. However, the list encompasses such a broad swath of individuals that it is hard to figure out who represents the most risk for the country, he said. What does emerge from the list are some revealing demographics. About 80 percent of those named are of Moroccan origin. Even in places such as Schaerbeek where the Muslim population is roughly half Turkish and half Moroccan, “we have no, or almost no, Turkish foreign fighters, and we have many Moroccan ones,” Mr. Leroy said.
Mr. Abdeslam and two others — Abid Aberkan, a relative who is accused of having sheltered him; and a man who is suspected of being an accomplice and whose identity is unclear — appeared in a Brussels court Thursday morning, but the hearing was postponed to April 7 at the request of their lawyers. More and more of those in Belgium who end up as radical militants start out as criminals, forming their bonds in criminal networks.
The suspected accomplice has used aliases, including Amine Choukri, Monir Ahmed Alaaj and Soufien Ayari. He was arrested with Mr. Abdeslam last Friday in Molenbeek. “The attacks in Paris and the ones in Brussels are prepared and executed by essentially the same network, and it’s quite an old network,” said Brice de Ruyvers, a professor of criminal law and criminology at Ghent University in Belgium, who has worked in government posts involving security.
Mr. Abdeslam’s arrest appeared to have set off an anxious response by Ibrahim el-Bakraoui. “They were not in the past a terrorist network, they became terrorists in liaison with ISIS and what happened in Syria in the past years — this is the case not just in Paris and Brussels, but there all those people come from the same neighborhood, they knew each other for years,” he said. “This is the composition of the network and these are the people who have established a clear link  between serious crimes and terrorist crimes;  they are used to using violence.”
In a statement found on a computer that was discarded in a trash can, which might have been a suicide note, Mr. Bakraoui wrote that he was wanted, felt unsafe, did not know what to do and feared that if he dallied, he risked ending up “next to him in a cell,” the Belgian federal prosecutor, Frédéric Van Leeuw, said on Wednesday.
He did not say whether “him” referred to Mr. Abdeslam.