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Brussels bomber ‘identified as jailer of foreign Isis hostages’ Brussels bomber ‘identified as jailer of foreign Isis hostages’
(about 1 hour later)
Najim Laachraoui, one of the Brussels airport bombers, has been identified by several Frenchmen held hostage by Islamic State in Syria as one of their prison guards, sources close to the investigation said on Friday. One of the two suicide bombers who killed 16 people at Brussels’ Zaventem airport last month has been identified as a former Islamic State prison guard in Syria.
According to one of the sources, four French journalists kidnapped and held in Syria from 2013 to 2014 had identified a guard known as “Abou Idriss”. French journalists seized in Syria by the terror group in 2013 have identified Najim Laachraoui, the presumed bomb-maker for both the Brussels attacks and those carried out in Paris in November last year, as one of the captors who held them hostage for 10 months, their lawyer said.
One of the journalists, Nicolas Henin, “has formally identified” Abou Idriss as being Najim Laachraoui, his lawyer Marie-Laure Ingouf said, confirming reports in French newspapers. “I can confirm that he was the jailer of my clients,” said Marie-Laure Ingouf, a lawyer for two of the four journalists who were freed in April 2014, confirming French media reports. Ingouf said one of her clients, Nicolas Hénin, had “formally identified” the bomber.
Belgian prosecutors have said Laachraoui travelled to Syria in February 2013 to join up with Isis forces. Laachraoui, a 24-year old Belgian national, blew himself up at the airport on March 22 with Ibrahim El Bakraoui , whose brother Khalid detonated another suicide bomb at the Maalbeek metro station shortly afterwards, killing a further 16 people.
There was no further trace of the Belgian national until he was registered under a false name at the border between Austria and Hungary in September 2015. Related: Paris and Brussels: the links between the attackers
Laachraoui, 24, was one of the two suicide bombers who struck Brussels airport on 22 March, while a third attacker blew himself up at on a metro train, with the two attacks killing 31 people. French media said the journalists had recognised Laachraoui as one of their captors, known to them as Abou Idriss, when his photograph was published in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks.
Prosecutors have also linked him to November’s attacks in Paris in which 130 people died, saying his DNA was found on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth at the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people were killed. They had earlier identified another of their jailers as Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman currently in custody after killing four people in an attack on Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May 2014, Le Parisien reported, and a third as Salim Benghalem, an Islamic State recruiter sentenced in absentia in France.
Police also found his DNA on explosives used at the Stade de France, leading investigators to believe he was the bomb maker in both the French and Belgian attacks. The paper said the journalists had described “Abou Idriss”, who had a slight Belgian accent, as less violent that Nemmouche, and said he occasionally asked them “scientific questions he expected them to answer”. The Belgian seemed to be “someone of intelligence, composed, capable of adapting rapidly to new situations”, Le Parisien quoted an interior minister as saying.
The former French hostages have already identified two Frenchmen as being among their jailers when they were held in Syria. Belgian prosecutors have said Laachraoui, an electrical engineering student who dropped out of university in Brussels, travelled to Syria in February 2013 to join Isis forces as a foreign fighter. He next resurfaced crossing the border between Hungary and Austria in September 2015 under a false name.
One, Mehdi Nemmouche, is in custody accused of killing four people in an attack on the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014. French prosecutors have linked him to the Paris attacks that killed 130 people two months later. Laachroaui’s DNA was found on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth found at at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 people died, and also on explosives used at the Stade de France.
The other is Salim Benghalem, who has been sentenced in absentia in France for recruiting for Isis and is listed as a “foreign terrorist combatant” by the United States. Earlier this month, Brussels police arrested Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” who was caught on CCTV cameras at the airport with Laachraoui and Ibrahim El Bakraoui and is suspected of preparing to detonate a third bomb before fleeing.
A Swedish national, Osama Krayem, who was filmed on CCTV talking to Khalid El Bakraoui minutes before the metro station bomb exploded, has also been arrested and charged in connection with both the Paris and Brussels attacks.
Brussels transport authorities announced on Friday that Maalbeek station, near the main European Union headquarters, will reopen on Monday after being closed since the bombing. Repair work will be completed by Friday evening, a spokeswoman said.
Train services to Zaventem airport, which was extensively damaged in the attacks, will also resume on Friday night. The airport itself partially reopened two weeks ago and is expected to be fully functioning in June.