Prosecutors say Brussels attackers were planning 2nd Paris assault
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THE attackers who struck Brussels last month initially planned a second assault on France, Belgium’s Federal Prosecution Office said yesterday.
But “surprised by the speed of the progress in the ongoing investigation” they decided to rush an attack on Brussels instead, the office said in a statement. It didn’t provide details of the initial plot or its targets.
Two suicide bombers killed 16 people at Brussels Airport on March 22. A subsequent explosion at Brussels’ Maelbeek metro station killed another 16 people the same morning. Investigators have found intimate links between the cell behind those attacks and the group that killed 130 people in Paris in November.
The airport bombers have been identified as Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui, believed to be the cell’s bomb maker. Ibrahim’s brother Khalid blew himself up at the metro station near the European Union’s headquarters.
Yesterday’s statement provides confirmation of what many suspected: the raids and arrests in the week leading up to the Brussels attacks — including the capture of key Paris attacks fugitive Salah Abdeslam — pushed the killers to action.
Belgian police detained four men in Brussels raids over the weekend who were charged with participating in “terrorist murders” and the “activities of a terrorist group” in relation to the Brussels attacks. One of them, Mohamed Abrini, has also been charged in relation to the Paris attacks.
Abrini acknowledged being the “man in the hat” spotted alongside the bombers who blew themselves up at Brussels airport, officials said. Surveillance footage has also placed him in the convoy with the attackers who headed to Paris ahead of the November 13 massacre.
Abrini was a childhood friend of Brussels brothers Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, both suspects in the Paris attacks, and he had ties to Abdelhamid Abbaoud, the Paris attackers’ ringleader who died in a French police raid shortly afterward.
Brahim blew himself up in the Paris bombings while his brother was arrested in Brussels on March 18 — four days before the attacks there — after a four-month manhunt.
According to a report in the Belgian daily L’Echo, not confirmed by prosecutors, Abrini confessed he wanted to return to Paris for another attack but was spooked by the investigation and hastily decided to carry out the Brussels bombings.
Abrini, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, was the last known Paris suspect still at large. He had been spotted on camera at a petrol station north of Paris two days before the attacks there. In the car with him was Abdeslam, who is now awaiting extradition from Belgium to France. Abdesalam has said he had intended to set off a suicide bomb during the Paris attacks but changed his mind at the last minute.
Prosecutors said Abrini confirmed his connection to the Brussels airport attack. The 31-year-old “confessed his presence at the crime scene” when they confronted him with evidence, including footage of a man in a hat and light-colored jacket seen next to the two bombers as they walked through the departure hall pushing trolleys loaded with bomb-filled bags.
“He is indeed the third man present at the Brussels national airport attacks,” they said in their statement. “He explained having thrown away his vest in a garbage bin and having sold his hat afterwards.”
The airport images triggered a furious manhunt for the “man in the hat.”
Police stepped up the search on Thursday when they released a video tracing the fugitive’s escape route after the blasts and appealed for the public’s help in identifying him.
The footage showed the suspect fleeing the airport and making his way back to central Brussels, appearing calm and composed, before surveillance cameras lose track of him.
The other suspects charged over the weekend were identified as Osama Krayem, who left the Swedish city of Malmo to fight in Syria and was described by one relative as having been “brainwashed,” Herve B. M., a Rwandan national, and Bilal E. M.
Krayem, the son of Syrian exiles, has been identified as the man seen on closed circuit television with Khalid moments before the metro bombing, prosecutors said.
Krayem, 23, was also caught on camera buying the bags used to conceal the bombs set off at the airport, they added.
The past couple of days’ developments represent a rare success for Belgian authorities, who have been repeatedly criticized for bungling the bombings investigation. Despite the progress, Brussels remains under the second-highest terror alert, meaning an attack is still considered likely.
“There are perhaps other cells that are still active on our territory,” Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon told RTL television on Saturday.
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