‘I don’t want to end up in a cell’ — Brussels bomber’s will found in trash

Brussels airport suicide bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui left a rushed will in a trashcan saying he did not know what to do since police were hunting for him, the federal prosecutor said Wednesday, a day after Bakraoui blew himself up at the departures lounge, killing at least 14 people.

Belgian authorities were searching Wednesday for a man pictured at the Brussels airport with two apparent terrorists, amid growing suggestions that Tuesday’s bombings at the Brussels airport and subway were the work of the same Islamic State cell that attacked Paris last year.

Officials said they still could not give a final figure for the death toll in the twin attacks, which some have put as high as 35. Some 200 people were wounded.

Bakraoui’s will said he was “in a rush, I don’t know what to do, hunted everywhere, no longer safe” and “I don’t want to end up in a cell next to him,” prosecutor Frederic van Leeuw said at a press conference.

“Him” appeared to be a reference to Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam, who is reportedly linked to Bakraoui and who is in custody in Belgium after being captured last week.

The will would seem to support speculation that Bakraoui, 29, and his 27-year-old brother Khalid went on the run after their Brussels apartment was raided in a deadly shootout on March 15, and may have improvised the twin attacks after the arrest of Abdeslam on Friday.

Van Leeuw said a man filmed at Brussels airport, who fled the scene without detonating his device, remains on the run, indicating that several people possibly linked to deadly attacks on Brussels are still on the loose.

“The third man is on the run; he left his bag with the biggest bomb in it which exploded later because it was so unstable,” Van Leeuw said, referring to the man in a hat and white coat and on the right in the CCTV images.

Van Leeuw also said that a different man — seen in black on the left of the image above — was also unknown, but that the one in the middle was Ibrahim El Bakraoui.

The Bakraoui brothers, both from the Brussels Forest neighborhood, were reportedly known to police, but only in connection to organized crime and not acts of terror.

Khalid El Bakraoui reportedly used a false name to rent the apartment that Belgian police raided on March 15, where they found detonators and fingerprints belonging to Abdeslam.

During the raid, Mohamed Belkaid, a jihadi previously unknown to authorities, was killed in a shootout with police while two people — now thought to have been the El-Bakraoui brothers — fled.

Paul Van Tigchelt, head of Belgium’s terrorism threat body, told reporters Wednesday that fears of multiple suspects at large is why the country is keeping the terrorism threat at its highest level, which means there is a danger of an imminent attack.

The European Union’s capital awoke under guard after Tuesday’s attacks. The Islamic State group, which was behind the Paris attacks, claimed responsibility for the Brussels bombings, which laid bare Europe’s vulnerability to a group trying to spread violence well beyond its bases in the Middle East.

Belgium is in the midst of three days of mourning, and government offices, schools and residents held a moment of silence Wednesday morning to honor the dead, marking the moment in a mood of defiance mixed with anxiety that others involved in the attacks may still be at large.

Police conducted raids overnight and circulated the photo of three men seen at the airport wheeling trolleys that presumably contained explosives-filled suitcases.