Authorities on Wednesday named two suicide bombers who struck Brussels as brothers linked to the prime suspect in Paris attacks to Salah Abdeslam, as a manhunt for a third assailant in Belgium’s bloodiest terror assault gathered pace.
Belgium’s federal prosecutor named Ibrahim El Bakraoui as one of the two men who blew themselves up at Brussels airport Tuesday, while his brother Khalid El Bakraoui struck a crowded metro train in coordinated blasts that left 35 dead and 270 injured.
“The third man is on the run,” prosecutor Frederic Van leeuw said of a man seen on CCTV pushing a trolley through Zaventem Airport alongside the two suicide bombers, shortly before the attacks claimed by the ISIS jehadist group.
“He left his bag with the biggest bomb in it which exploded later because it was so unstable,” Van leeuw told a Press conference, adding that police had found a massive stash of explosives in a Brussels apartment. Belgian investigators have unleashed a dragnet, releasing CCTV images of the three airport attackers, with the second suicide bomber and the third man, on the run, still unidentified.
Belgium stood still at noon to mark a minute’s silence for the victims of the carnage that left bodies strewn across the airport’s departures hall and a train at Maalbeek station, near the European Union’s headquarters. Three days of national mourning have been declared as King Philippe and Prime Minister Charles Michel led a minute’s silence outside the EU headquarters in Brussels. And at the city’s Place de la Bourse, defiant applause broke out amongst the large crowd gathered to honour the dead, chanting: “long live Belgium”.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has cancelled his visit to China and Belgium’s football friendly against Portugal next week has been moved to the Portuguese city of leiria from Brussels because of the attacks.
Meanwhile, Brussels airport will remain closed on Thursday its chief executive said after the bomb attacks wrecked the departure hall. “There will be no passenger flights into and out of Brussels airport on March 24,” Arnaud Feist said in a tweet.
In a statement, the airport said it was working with airlines to help thousands of passengers stranded by the attacks, many of them having fled without their baggage as instructed by security staff.
Those who did so could now contact their airline to get their luggage back, it said, but they would still not be able to retrieve their cars.
leeuw revealed that airport bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui had left a desperate “will” on a computer that he dumped in a trash can on the street, in which he said he was being “hunted everywhere”.
“I don’t know what to do,” the letter read. And in an apparent reference to the Paris attacker Abdeslam, he added: “I don’t want to end up in a cell next to him.”
Investigators had found an unexploded bomb, an IS flag and bomb-making materials in an apartment on the same street in the Brussels district of Schaerbeek on Tuesday night.
The find also included 15 kilos of TATP high explosive, Van leeuw confirmed.
Broadcaster RTBF said metro bomber Khalid El Bakraoui had rented an apartment in Brussels last week under a false name where Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found.
He is also linked to another apartment in southern Belgium that Abdeslam and other jehadists used before the Paris attacks.