Belgium releases sole suspect charged over Brussels attacks
Prosecutors lack evidence linking bombings to Faycal Cheffou, suspected of fleeing airport after failed detonation attempt
The sole suspect charged over last week’s Brussels attacks was released Monday following a lack of evidence linking him to the carnage, Belgian prosecutors said.
“The indications that led to the arrest of Faycal C. were not substantiated by the ongoing inquiry. As a result, the subject has been released by the examining magistrate,” the federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement, without giving further details.
Belgian media had identified the man as Faycal Cheffou who claimed to be a freelance journalist.
Cheffou was charged on Saturday with “taking part in a terrorist group, terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder.”
A source close to the inquiry previously said that prosecutors were looking into the theory that he was the third man seen in CCTV footage alongside two suicide bombers at Zaventem airport.
His release comes as a new blow to an inquiry already dogged by accusations that Belgium missed a series of leads in cracking down on a jihadist network linked to the attacks and a similar assault in Paris in November.
Police earlier Monday released CCTV footage of a third suspect in the March 22 Zaventem airport attack, the so-called “man in the hat” seen with two other men who blew themselves up.
Officials also updated the death toll from the bombings at the airport and at Maalbeek metro station to 35, the worst terror attacks in Belgium’s history, after four more people had died while hospitalized.
In the video released Monday, a man in a hat and white jacket is seen pushing a trolley with a large bag through the departure hall next to bombers Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7An9d2105LQ
“It’s a new video which had not previously been released,” a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office said.
A police notice issued with the video — still images from which have previously been released — said that officers “want to identify this man.”
Prosecutors earlier said three men arrested in raids in Belgium over the weekend had been charged with “participation in the activities of a terrorist group” but that no direct link had been established with the Brussels attacks.
The men — identified as Yassine A., Mohamed B. and Aboubaker O. — were held during 13 raids in Brussels and the towns of Mechelen and Duffel. A fourth person arrested at the same time was released.
In the latest piece in the puzzle of the jihadist cross-border networks, police arrested a 32-year-old French national in Rotterdam Sunday on suspicion of planning a terror attack, Dutch prosecutors said, following a raid carried out at the request of French authorities.
The man is thought to have been planning an attack in France in the name of the Islamic State group along with Reda Kriket, who was detained near Paris on Thursday, a French police source told AFP.
Belgian prosecutors at the weekend also charged two men with involvement in the Kriket plot, including one shot in the leg after a dramatic stand-off at a tram stop in Brussels on Friday.
An Algerian held in Italy as part of a probe into fake ID documents used by the Paris and Brussels attackers is still being interrogated but refused to answer questions, a judicial source said.
The Times of Israel Community.