9 arrests following Belgian attacks while France thwarts militant plot
Print Edition
BELGIAN police have arrested seven people and Germany two in investigations into Islamic State suicide bombings in Brussels, while authorities in France said they had thwarted a militant plot “that was at an advanced stage.”
Islamic State suicide bombers hit Brussels airport and a metro train on Tuesday, killing at least 31 people and wounding some 270 in the worst such attack in Belgian history.
Investigators believe the attacks were carried out by the same cell responsible for the attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in November.
The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said six people were held during searches in the Brussels neighborhoods of Schaerbeek in the north and Jette in the west, as well as in the center of the Belgian capital. Public broadcaster RTBF said a seventh man was arrested in the Forest borough of Brussels early yesterday.
Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said German police arrested two people. One had received phone messages with the name of the metro station bomber and the word “fin” three minutes before the metro blast, it said.
Belgium’s De Standaard newspaper said police arrested a man caught on security footage in the airport terminal next to two bombers who blew themselves up there. Prosecutors did not confirm the arrest and it was not known if the man was among those detained.
The attack in Brussels, home to the European Union and NATO, has heightened security concerns around the world and raised questions about EU states’ ability to respond in an effective, coordinated way to the Islamist militant threat.
US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Brussels yesterday to offer US assistance in security. “The United States is praying and grieving with you for the loved ones of those cruelly taken from us, including Americans, and for the many who were injured in these despicable attacks,” he said after meeting Prime Minister Charles Michel.
“Je suis bruxellois. Ik ben Brussel,” Kerry said after brief remarks in French and Dutch, expressing solidarity in its two languages that he too felt a citizen of the Belgian capital.
In Paris on Thursday, authorities arrested a French national suspected of belonging to a militant network planning an attack in France, although they said there was no evidence directly tying his plot to the Brussels and Paris attacks.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a televised address that the arrest helped “foil a plot in France that was at an advanced stage.”
A wanted notice published by French media named him as Reda Kriket, 34, sentenced in his absence to 10 years in prison in Belgium last July for recruiting Islamist fighters for Syria.
After the arrest by the French counterterrorism service, DGSI, the agency raided an apartment building in the northern Paris suburb of Argenteuil. A police source said investigators found acetone peroxide explosives in the apartment.
Belgium’s interior and justice ministers have offered to resign over a failure to track one of the airport bombers, Brahim El Bakraoui, 29, who had been expelled last year by Turkey as a suspected fighter. Bakraoui’s brother Khalid, 26, was the bomber who struck Maelbeek metro station.
Interior Minister Jan Jambon and Justice Minister Koen Geens tendered their resignations but Michel asked them to stay. “In time of war, you cannot leave the field,” Jambon said.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Brahim El Bakraoui had been expelled in July after being arrested near the Syrian border, and two officials said he had been deported a second time. Belgian and Dutch police had been notified of Turkish suspicions he was a foreign fighter trying to reach Syria.
At the time, Belgian authorities said Bakraoui, who had skipped parole after serving less than half of a nine-year sentence for armed robbery, was a criminal but not a militant.
Brother and sister on the phone as bombs explode
A Chinese national, a Dutch brother and sister, and a British man were among the 31 people who died in Tuesday’s bomb attacks in Brussels.
Dutch public newscaster NOS named the brother and sister as Alexander Pinczowski and Sascha Pinczowski, both 21, who lived in New York.
A Dutch newspaper said they were on the phone to a relative when the bombs went off and the line went dead.
Another Dutch victim was Elita Weah, 41, who was on her way to her stepfather’s funeral in the United States.
Britain’s Foreign Office confirmed that computer programmer David Dixon, 51, from Hartlepool in northern England, but who lived in Brussels, had died in the metro attack.
Dixon texted his aunt after the airport blasts to say he was safe, but happened to be on the metro system when a suicide bomber blew himself up.
A Chinese national was also among those killed, the Chinese embassy in Belgium confirmed yesterday.
“We express deep condolences over the death of our Chinese compatriot and strong condemnation on the criminal act of the terrorists,” the embassy said on its website.
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