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Police Release Man Misidentified as Brussels Airport Attacker Police Release Man Misidentified as Brussels Airport Attacker
(about 1 hour later)
BRUSSELS — In another blunder acknowledged after the Brussels bombings, the Belgian authorities said Monday that they had misidentified a man arrested as the missing suspect shown in an airport surveillance photo, wearing a dark hat and white coat. BRUSSELS — A noisy citizen journalist who reveled in verbal and physical fights in public spaces, Fayçal Cheffou never quite fit the profile of a furtive underground operative for the Islamic State. Yet that was the role assigned to him when the Belgian authorities announced that he had been charged with terrorism and the Belgian news media identified him as the “third bomber” at Brussels Airport in last Tuesday’s attacks.
The man, arrested on Thursday and charged on Friday, was released after three days in custody, during which some officials publicly vilified him as a terrorist. On Monday, the police said the real suspect, one of the men who took bombs hidden in luggage to a departure hall at Brussels Airport, remained at large, and they issued a new plea to the public to help identify him. Mr. Cheffou’s arrest last week, curiously easy as he was picked up right outside the federal prosecutor’s office, signaled a big break for a Belgian security apparatus assailed by complaints that it had missed vital clues before the terrorist assault at the airport and a subway station.
The release of the man — identified by the Belgian news media and Belgian officials as Fayçal Cheffou, who has called himself a freelance journalist — is a setback for the Belgian authorities, who have struggled for more than a year to get a handle on the growing threat of Islamic State militants. Now it looks as if the police got the wrong man, or at least lacked enough evidence to hold him. Mr. Cheffou was released on Monday.
Officials have acknowledged other serious missteps since the attacks last week, including a failure to piece together vital pieces of evidence that might have averted them. Vilified as “an extremist jihadi horror” early on Monday by a senior Belgian official, Mr. Cheffou was freed just a few hours later with the authorities acknowledging that the evidence against a man they had charged with terrorism and murder was not as strong as they had thought. This suggested that Mr. Cheffou had been mistakenly identified by a witness as the bomber in a dark hat and white coat in an airport surveillance photo.
“The evidence that had led to the arrest of the man named Fayçal C. was not substantiated by the evolution of the ongoing investigation,” Thierry Werts, a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor, said in a statement. “Consequently, he has been freed by the investigative judge.” On Monday, the Belgian police again asked for help identifying that bomber, releasing for the first time surveillance video showing him and the two other attackers slowly pushing luggage carts through the airport with large black bags on them.
Mr. Cheffou had been picked out of a photographic lineup by a cabdriver who shuttled three men to Brussels Airport, where two of them — later identified as Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui — blew themselves up at 7:58 a.m. last Tuesday. Mr. Bakraoui’s younger brother, Khalid, blew himself up at 9:11 a.m. at the Maelbeek subway station. To add to the confusion, Eric Van der Sijpt, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said Monday that the charges against Mr. Cheffou remained for the moment.
The death toll from the attacks rose on Monday to 35, as the authorities reported that four victims who had been hospitalized died from their injuries. The toll, which was reported by the Belgian health minister, Maggie De Block, did not include the three suicide bombers. Later in the day, Ms. De Block said 96 victims were still hospitalized: 93 in Belgium, two in France and one who was being transferred to a hospital in the United States. “We’re not saying that he’s innocent. That we do not do,” Mr. Van der Sijpt said in telephone interview. “It’s that he’s no longer needed in prison. But there are two different things. Preventative custody has nothing to do with the actual investigations or the charges brought.”
Over the weekend, the authorities were said to be analyzing DNA evidence to determine whether Mr. Cheffou — who was arrested early Thursday evening in front of the federal prosecutor’s office, of all places — was the third airport attacker. But without waiting for confirmation, some Belgian officials spoke openly of Mr. Cheffou as a terrorist. He added that the prosecutor would decide at the end of the investigation whether to prosecute Mr. Cheffou, and that only then would the status of the charges against him be decided.
On Twitter, Theo Francken, the state secretary for asylum and migration, called Mr. Cheffou “an extremist jihadi horror.” In a separate statement, the prosecutor’s office said Monday that three men detained in and around Brussels on Sunday had been charged with participating in the activities of a terrorist group. It was not clear if they were connected to the attacks last Tuesday.
In an interview on Saturday, Yvan Mayeur, the mayor of the City of Brussels, the central borough of the 19 municipalities that make up the Belgian capital, said Mr. Cheffou had been identified in a police photo line by the taxi driver, but added that the authorities were still waiting for DNA confirmation that he was the bomber. The disarray over Mr. Cheffou followed a catalog of mishaps and errors that last week prompted Belgium’s ministers of justice and the interior to offer their resignations — they were asked to stay on — and led to angry questioning of the government during a parliamentary hearing on Belgium’s response to terrorism.
Mr. Mayeur added that he did not know whether Mr. Cheffou had been involved in terrorism, but did know him to be a local troublemaker who had repeatedly disrupted a camp of refugees in Park Maximilien, near the Gare du Nord railway station. Reflecting public outrage over mounting evidence that the authorities ignored or misinterpreted signals that might have prevented the attacks, Le Soir, a leading French-language Belgian newspaper, last week splashed a damning indictment of the security apparatus across its front page: “Serious mistakes.” La Capitale, another newspaper, was blunter still: “Chaos,” its front page screamed.
Mr. Cheffou, he said, often harangued and got into fights with volunteers from Belgian nongovernmental organizations, denouncing them for not being Muslims and urging migrants in their care to rebel. “He tried to get the refugees to turn against N.G.O.s because they were ‘nonbelievers,’” Mr. Mayeur recalled. Since then, dismay has only increased, with rival French- and Dutch-speaking politicians trading accusations on Monday over who was responsible for allowing several hundred hooligans to storm a makeshift shrine to the victims of the terrorist attacks in front of the old Brussels stock exchange on Sunday. The French speakers denounced the hooligans, who had assembled on Saturday in the town of Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, as Dutch-speaking fascists.
In September, after prosecutors declined to intervene, the mayor issued a municipal order banning Mr. Cheffou from the migrant encampment, which was later shut down. Then, just as the hooligan furor was reaching its peak, the federal prosecutor’s office announced that Mr. Cheffou, named only as Fayçal C. in official statements, had been released. And with that the best hope so far of piecing together the terrorist plot and perhaps identifying other plots in the works had suddenly evaporated. The three other people so far identified as directly involved in last week’s attacks — two brothers, Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, and the suspected bomb-maker, Najim Laachraoui — are all dead.
In a video that Mr. Cheffou appears to have made in July 2014, he stood in front of a detention center for refugees and asylum seekers in Steenokkerzeel, near Brussels Airport. In the video, Mr. Cheffou faulted the government for serving Muslim refugees meals before the end of the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. “The evidence that had led to the arrest of the man named Fayçal C. was not substantiated by the evolution of the ongoing investigation,” Thierry Werts, another spokesman for the federal prosecutor, said in a statement. “Consequently, he has been freed by the investigative judge.”
On Monday, the Belgian police again asked for help identifying the airport attacker, and they released for the first time surveillance footage showing him and the two attackers who died. The silent footage, which appears to be slowed down, shows the three men pushing luggage carts with large black bags. The video focuses on the man in the white coat and dark hat and blurs out the rest. The man has a short black beard and appears to be wearing glasses. Belgians writing on Twitter in Dutch expressed outrage over the latest turn of events. “We got him but it was the wrong guy #painful,” said one. Another fumed: “Cheffou the new hero of the Left on Twitter. I’m going to be sick.” Others, mostly writing in French, pilloried the authorities for having arrested Mr. Cheffou in the first place.
Also on Monday, the Belgian authorities announced that they had charged three men who were detained on Sunday with participating in the activities of a terrorist group. The men — identified only as Yassine A., Mohamed B. and Aboubaker O. — were arrested in police raids in and around Brussels. It was not clear if they were connected to the attacks last Tuesday. Mr. Cheffou had been picked out of a photographic lineup by a cabdriver who shuttled three men to Brussels Airport, where two of them — Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Mr. Laachraoui — blew themselves up at 7:58 a.m. last Tuesday. Mr. Bakraoui’s younger brother, Khalid, blew himself up at 9:11 a.m. at the Maelbeek subway station.
The Belgian police conducted 13 home searches on Sunday — four in Mechelen, a town about 20 miles north of Brussels; one in Duffel, about 25 miles north of the capital; and eight in Brussels itself — and they arrested nine people. Six were released after questioning. The death toll from the attacks rose on Monday to 35, as the authorities reported that four victims who had been hospitalized died from their injuries. The toll, which was reported by the Belgian health minister, Maggie De Block, did not include the three suicide bombers.
The authorities across Europe have intensified counterterrorism operations in the wake of the attacks, with arrests in at least five countries, some of them connected to the attacks in Brussels and others to the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, or other terrorist networks. In an interview on Sunday, Yvan Mayeur, the mayor of the City of Brussels, the central borough of the 19 municipalities that make up the Belgian capital, said the taxi driver had identified Mr. Cheffou in a police photo lineup, but that the authorities were still waiting for DNA confirmation that he was the bomber.
One of those arrests was made on Sunday in the Netherlands, in the port city of Rotterdam, where the police arrested a 32-year-old French citizen, identified as Anis B. The French authorities, who want him extradited, believe that Anis B. is tied to Reda Kriket, a 34-year-old French citizen who was arrested near Paris last week on suspicions that he was in the advanced stages of planning an attack in France. That plot has not been linked to the attacks in Brussels or in Paris. Mr. Mayeur added that he did not know whether Mr. Cheffou had been involved in terrorism, but did know him to be a local troublemaker who had repeatedly disrupted a camp of refugees in Parc Maximilien, near the Gare du Nord railway station.
Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch national prosecutor’s office, said in a telephone interview that the police had found cellphones, SIM cards, computer hard drives, cash and drugs during a search of Anis B.’s apartment. They also found an unspecified amount of ammunition, but no explosives or weapons, Mr. de Bruin said. Mr. Cheffou, he said, often harangued and got into fights with volunteers from Belgian nongovernmental organizations, denouncing them for not being Muslims and urging migrants in their care to rebel.
Three other men — ages 35, 43 and 47 — were arrested by the police in Rotterdam on Sunday, all of them of Algerian background, Mr. de Bruin said. They were still being questioned by the police, and their connection to Anis B. or to a wider plot had not been established. “He tried to get the refugees to turn against N.G.O.s because they were ‘nonbelievers,’” Mr. Mayeur recalled.
Two other men have been detained in Brussels in connection with Mr. Kriket. One of them, identified as Rabah N., has been charged with participating in the activities of a terrorist group. In September, after prosecutors declined to intervene, the mayor issued a municipal order barring Mr. Cheffou from the migrant encampment, which was later shut down.
On Sunday evening, France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said French investigators had helped to “thwart a terrorist attack plot on our soil” after arresting Mr. Kriket, and he praised the “cooperation with our European partners” that led to the arrests in Rotterdam and Brussels. His written order accused Mr. Cheffou of wreaking havoc at the camp, alleging that four of his underlings had tried in September to force a 17-year-old female migrant to spend the night with “the chief.” She escaped with help from volunteers. It also said he had denounced Belgian workers at the camp as being infidels, collaborators with the state and, in one case, in the pay of Israel.
Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, said Monday that Mr. Kriket’s detention had been extended for 24 hours. French law authorizes the authorities to detain a suspect for up to six days in terrorism cases. “He is constantly seeking to destabilize by all means possible” the work of the camp, the mayor wrote in his order.
Ms. Thibault-Lecuivre declined to comment on French news reports that bomb-making material and weapons had been found last week at Mr. Kriket’s apartment in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris.