Belgian investigators on Wednesday were focused on a small cluster of city blocks as they scrambled to piece together the plot behind Tuesday’s grisly terrorist attacks, but political and security fallout from the triple bombing is being felt across the Continent, where many are now questioning whether fundamental European values of openness and solidarity can survive.
With fears mounting that the Islamic State’s footprint on the Continent is far greater than previously believed, hard-liners from France to Britain, Italy and Poland have pointed to Tuesday’s carnage as fresh evidence of the potential dangers associated with the European Union’s open-border policies and closer security and intelligence-sharing ties.
Such sentiment will loom large over an emergency meeting Thursday by EU justice and interior ministers in Brussels, where authorities now believe that the men who blew themselves up in the city’s airport and subway system were part of the same network of Islamic extremists who carried out the terrorist attacks that rocked Paris in November.
Belgians began three days of mourning Wednesday for the 34 people killed a day earlier by three explosions — two of which were suicide bombings — that the Syria- and Iraq-based Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, has said it carried out. The terrorist group is already warning of far worse attacks to come in Europe.
The mood was one of defiance mixed with anxiety in Brussels as government offices, schools and residents held a moment of silence at noon Wednesday, as word spread that several people who may be linked to the bombings were still on the loose and the nation’s threat alert remained at its highest level.
Security forces stood guard around the neighborhood housing the headquarters of European Union institutions, while the airport and several Brussels metro stations remained closed. Authorities said the airport would stay closed at least through Thursday, forcing the cancellation of 600 flights each day.
In the afternoon, thousands of people gathered at Place de la Bourse in the center of downtown Brussels — including dozens of students chanting “stop the war” — in solidarity with those killed.
Suspects on the loose
Authorities now believe two brothers acted as suicide bombers at the heart of Tuesday’s plot and that a third suspect who helped them is now on the run in the Belgian capital.
With an intense manhunt still underway, officials said brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui were responsible for one of the two blasts at Brussels’ international airport, as well as the explosion that ripped through a metro train running beneath the city.
Belgian Federal Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said Ibrahim El Bakraoui, 29, was one of three men seen on closed circuit television at the airport pushing a baggage trolley moments before the explosions. His brother Khalid, 27, is said to have blown himself up on the metro train.
Mr. Van Leeuw said a taxi driver who drove Ibrahim El Bakraoui and two others to the airport on Tuesday morning had led investigators to an apartment where more than 30 pounds of TATP explosives, along with nails and other materials used to make bombs was found.
Questions surrounded the status of the second suicide bomber at the airport, which some reports identified as 25-year-old Najim Laachraoui, believed to be the master bombmaker in the Brussels Islamic State terror network. Early reports said he was on the run, but some U.S. news reports said Laachraoui also was killed when a bomb he was carrying exploded at the airport.
Laachraoui has actually been on the radar of European counterterrorism officials for months, since he was linked to at least two explosives belts used in the wave of attacks that killed 130 people at a Paris stadium, rock concert and cafes in November.
Belgian officials had ratcheted up a search for Laachraoui during the days leading up to Tuesday’s bombings because his DNA had more recently been discovered at an Islamic State hideout used by a high-profile Paris suspect who was arrested in Brussels last week.
Salah Abdeslam, who is believed to be the lone surviving member of the 11-man team of terrorists that hit Paris, was taken into custody Friday and has reportedly been cooperating with Belgian investigators since — a reality that has prompted difficult questions over whether the Brussels attacks may have been thwarted if Belgian authorities had acted more quickly.
The biggest question is whether Abdeslam’s arrest may have been what triggered Tuesday’s attackers to act when they did out of fear that they too were about to be apprehended.
The El Bakraoui brothers, in particular, are seen to have had close ties with Abdeslam and may have traveled between Belgium and Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria as recently as July.
On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported, citing “European and Iraqi intelligence officials and a French lawmaker who follows the jihadi networks,” that the Islamic State has trained at least 400 terrorists in semi-autonomous cells to target Europe at times, places and methods of each cell’s choice.
The officials described camps in Syria and Iraq where the training is taking place, and the Islamic State itself, in taking credit for the attack, described a “secret cell of soldiers.”
A report on Belgian broadcaster RTBF Wednesday said Khalid El Bakraoui had rented under a false name the apartment where police were hunting for Abdeslam last week. He’s also believed to have rented a safe house used in the Belgian city of Charleroi that was used by the Paris attackers.
Investigators who raided the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek on Wednesday found a computer in a trash can on the street with a note on it from Ibrahim El Bakraoui saying he felt increasingly unsafe and feared landing in prison.
In an ominous twist, meanwhile, Turkish authorities claimed Wednesday that they had actually detained Ibrahim El Bakraoui near the Turkish-Syrian border in July and sent him back to the Netherlands, warning both that country and Belgium that he was a “foreign terrorist fighter.”
It was not immediately clear why the suspected bomber was not sent to Belgium, where he is believed to be a citizen. But a Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity with The Associated Press said Ibrahim El Bakraoui was ultimately allowed to go free because Belgian authorities could not establish any ties to extremism.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said authorities would have no reason to have detained Ibrahim El Bakraoui last year as an Islamic State suspect because he was “not known for terrorist acts but as a common law criminal who was on conditional release.”
A challenge to Europe
The political fallout from the attacks was being felt across Europe on Wednesday, with hard-line political parties in some nations calling for a crackdown on Muslims, and others asserting that the EU’s open-border policies are in need of a major overhaul.
Citizens of the 28-nation bloc can presently pass freely across each other’s borders without stringent identity checks, and transport hubs contain very few security checks. Profiling of suspects is also seen to be immensely challenging for intelligence agencies because of the continent’s vast racial diversity.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front party, has responded to the Brussels attacks by calling for the immediate closure of the Belgian-France border.
The anti-immigration Northern League party in Italy is backing a closure of all mosques in its nation. And, according to a report posted Wednesday on the website MNI Euro Insight, the leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria has blamed the attacks on “mass immigration from the Arab world” and called for an end to the EU’s open border policy “once and for all.”
The anti-immigration sentiment has also been on display in Poland, whose government suddenly backed away Wednesday from an earlier pledge to resettle some 7,000 refugees spawned by the civil war that has given rise to Islamic State in Syria.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is known to be staunchly anti-migrant and was seen to have agreed to the resettlement under pressure from others in the EU, which has come under increasing strain as nearly 2 million refugees have flowed into the region since 2014.
But government spokesman Rafal Bochenek said Wednesday that Poland is now “not able to accept immigrants” due to security risks. “For us,” Mr. Bochenek added, “the most important thing is the safety of Poles.”
Advocates for Britain’s exit from the EU have also pounced on Tuesday’s attacks in an attempt to drum up support for their cause. The U.K. is slated to hold a national referendum on the so-called “Brexit” issue in June.
Pro-Brexit activists have been heard on the radio during recent days warning that there are terrorists among the waves of refugees entering the EU and asserting that Britain must isolate itself from the bloc’s open border culture.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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