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Brussels police try to identify man pictured with suicide bomber Brussels police believe five bombers may have been involved in attacks
(about 1 hour later)
Police investigating the Brussels suicide attacks are working to identify a man filmed in the company of metro train bomber Khalid el-Bakraoui shortly before he blew himself up, French and Belgian media have reported. Belgian police are hunting a third man filmed with two suicide bombers at Brussels airport and believe another suspect may have been involved in the blast at a metro station, as evidence mounted that all were part of the same Islamic State network responsible for last November’s carnage in Paris.
France’s Le Monde and the Belgian broadcaster RTBF said the man was carrying a big bag and was considered a potential fifth attacker. It is not clear whether he died in the attack or escaped. European Union justice and interior ministers were meeting in an emergency session on Thursday as pressure intensified on the bloc to improve cooperation against terror attacks in the wake of the bombings in the Belgian capital, which killed at least 31 people and injured 270 more from nearly 40 countries.
Some 48 hours after the attacks, the police investigation in Brussels is focused on identifying and finding possible accomplices or other attackers. Turkey has accused Belgium of ignoring warnings about Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who was deported from Turkey last year as a suspected foreign fighter in Syria and has now been identified as one of the two suicide bombers who blew themselves and 11 other people up at the airport shortly before 8am on Tuesday.
Three bombers, two at the airport and one at the metro station, are believed dead but a third man seen at the airport – pictured on CCTV wearing white – remains unidentified and is the subject of an ongoing manhunt. Links are being examined to all suspects who have been arrested in connection to terrorism offences in recent months in Belgium, particularly those who were detained after raids relating to the Paris attacks. Just over an hour later, Ibrahim’s brother Khalid detonated a bomb that killed at least 20 more people at Maelbeek metro station. French and Belgian media have said a man carrying a large bag was seen on CCTV in Khalid’s company just before the explosion and could have been a potential fifth attacker.
At least three suspects in the Brussels attacks had known links to the terror cell behind November’s carnage in Paris, and one was flagged by Turkey as an Islamist militant and deported in June 2015. It is not clear whether the man, pictured in a computer-generated image with hollow cheeks and a small goatee beard, was killed in the blast or escaped.
A key figure who was arrested in Belgium in the days following the Paris attacks in November is Mohamed Bakkali, 28. He was suspected of renting two of the Belgian hide-outs for the Paris attackers. During searches at Bakkali’s wife’s house in November, police found a 10-minute film shot by a fixed-camera hidden in a bush, which showed the home of a senior Belgian nuclear official in the Flanders region, and the official coming and going. Police sources have told Belgian media they believe the second dead suicide bomber at the airport was Najim Laachraoui, 24, a veteran Belgian Islamic State fighter and bombmaker whose DNA was found on two of the explosive belts that were used in the Paris attacks.
Bakkali has been in prison since his arrest at the end of November. The third suspect captured on airport security cameras, wearing a cream jacket and pushing a baggage trolley into the departures hall alongside Laachraoui and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, is now the subject of a manhunt target of police searches. The Belgian federal prosecutor, Frédéric van Leeuw, has said the man fled the airport leaving behind a third suitcase bomb.
In a report that has not been confirmed by Belgian prosecutors, the Belgian broadcaster RTBF said Bakkali’s name appeared in the will left on a computer thrown in a bin by the Brussels airport bomber Ibrahim el-Bakraoui. All the Brussels attackers so far identified by police and prosecutors have links to Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect in the string of suicide bombings and shootings that killed 130 people in Paris last November.
In this will, Bakraoui complained of feeling hunted and said he did not want to end up in a prison cell like another man, whom he did not name. Laachraoui travelled to Hungary with Abdeslam last year, while the Bakraoui brothers rented safe houses in Belgium and France used by the Paris attackers and by Abdeslam himself after the attacks.
Turkey said on Wednesday it had warned Belgium that Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who acted as a suicide bomber at the Brussels airport, was a suspected foreign fighter when it deported him to the Netherlands in 2015. Related: Paris and Brussels: the links between the attackers
His brother, Khalid, is believed by authorities to have carried out the bombing of the metro station, and Najim Laachraoui has been tentatively named in Belgian media as the second airport bomber. Before the bombings all three were being sought by police in connection with the Paris attacks, and were believed to be linked to one of the Paris terrorists, Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested in Brussels last week. Abdeslam, 26, who was captured in the Belgian capital last week, appeared briefly in court on Thursday and was remanded in custody until 7 April. His lawyer, Sven Mary, said Abdeslam did not know anything about the Brussels attacks. He no longer opposes extradition to France, Mary said, but “wishes to leave ... as quickly as possible” in order “to explain himself”.
During a raid on an apartment in Schaerbeek, police found a laptop containing a note written by Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, saying he suspected the police were searching for him. Belgian officials resisted Turkish criticism of their inaction following Ibrahim el-Bakraoui’s deportation last July, pointing out that suspected militants expelled from Turkey cannot be detained without evidence they have committed a crime.
European security chiefs will hold an emergency meeting in Brussels on Thursday after the twin terrorist attacks on the city, which killed 31 and injured more than 300 people. Some world leaders have raised questions about the ease of access to Europe by terrorists, and criticised Belgium’s record of responding to the threat of terrorism before the deadly attacks in its capital. The justice minister, Koen Geens, denied the 30-year-old Belgian citizen had been flagged as a possible terrorist. “At that time, he was not known here for terrorism,” Geens said. “He was a common law criminal out on parole.”
So far, three of the dead have been named. Adelma Tapia Ruiz, a Peruvian, was killed at the airport. Her husband, Christopher Delcambe, and their twin three-year-old daughters survived after they stepped outside the departures area for the girls to play, shortly before the explosion. But the case of Ibrahim el-Bakraoui – who like his brother had a long criminal record – underlines the scale of the problem facing the country’s security and intelligence services: some 300 Belgian nationals have fought in Syria, making Belgium the top European exporter of jihadi fighters relative to its population.
The death of 20-year-old Belgian law student Leopold Hecht at the Maelbeek metro station, was confirmed by Brussels’ Saint Louis University. It said in a Facebook post Hecht was “one of the unfortunate victims of barbaric acts”. Oliviere Delespesse, an employee of the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels, was also killed at Maelbeek. As criticism mounted of Belgium’s apparent inability to smash domestic extremist networks, the country’s foreign minister, Didier Reynders, insisted security always had to be balanced with civil rights.
Another 28 deaths are yet to be publicly identified; it is unclear whether the three suicide bombers are included in that number. The identification process has been complicated by the violence of the attack and the number of foreigners among the victims. The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, also came to Belgium’s defence, telling the Flemish-language daily De Standaard: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. There was terrorism in Britain and in Germany in the 1970s and 1980. There was terrorism in Spain, in Italy and much more recently in France. People should stop lecturing Belgium.”
The US defence secretary, Ash Carter, said events in the headquarters city of the EU and Nato showed more needed to be done to help American efforts to combat Islamic State in the Middle East.
“The Brussels event is going to further signify to Europeans that, as we have been accelerating our campaign to defeat Isil [Isis] in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere, they need to accelerate their efforts and join us,” Carter told CNN.
Brussels airport is likely to remain closed until Saturday, with passengers diverted to Antwerp, Liege and Lille in France. Another minute’s silence was held across the country on Thursday, the second of three days of national mourning.