Police said to ID brothers linked to Paris attacker as Brussels bombers
Khalid and Ibrahim El-Bakraoui, both with criminal past, reportedly identified as perpetrators of deadly attack; had rented apartment where Paris suspect's fingerprints were found
Police have identified two brothers who rented an apartment linked to suspects in November’s Paris attacks as the suicide bombers who blew themselves up at Brussels Airport on Tuesday killing at least 10 people, according to Belgian media.
Khalid and Ibrahim El-Bakraoui were named by Belgium broadcaster RTBF Wednesday as two of the perpetrators of the airport attack, which was followed by another explosion on the Brussels metro killing up to 20 people.
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.
A third man, dressed in a light-colored jacket and wearing a dark hat, who was shown with the two others in a CCTV grab from the airport issued Tuesday, is believed to have fled the scene and is now the subject of a massive manhunt and may have also been linked to the Paris attacks.
He was named by Belgian media on Wednesday as Najim Laachraoui.
The brothers, both from the Brussels Forest neighborhood, were reportedly known to police but only in connection to organized crime and not acts of terror.
Police had been searching for the two since a raid on their apartment on March 15 turned up detonators and fingerprints belonging to Salah Abdeslam, wanted as a suspected terrorist involved in the November 13 Paris attacks that killed 130.
During the raid, a jihadi previously unbeknownst to authorities, Mohamed Belkaid, was killed in a shootout with police while two people fled.
Media speculation indicated the two suspects on the lam from a massive manhunt may have been the el-Bakraoui brothers.
Khalid el-Bakraoui is believed to have rented the apartment under a fake name, along with another apartment in Charleroi, according to RTBF.
In the apartment, a Kalashnikov assault rifle was found by Belkaid’s body, as well as a book on Salafism, an ultraconservative strain of Islam. Elsewhere in the apartment, police found an Islamic State banner as well as 11 Kalashnikov loaders and a large quantity of ammunition, Belgian prosecutors said.
On Friday, the prosecutors said Belkaid was “most probably” an accomplice of Abdeslam and had been using a fake Belgian ID card in the name of Samir Bouzid. A man using that ID was one of two men seen with Abdeslam in a rental car on the Hungarian-Austrian border in September.
The other man in the car is thought to have been Najim Laachraoui, named in Belgian media Wednesday as the third man seen with the bombers before the airport attack who apparently fled the scene.
The same fake ID used by Belkaid was used on November 17 to transfer 750 euros to the cousin of Abdelhamid Abbaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Paris attack.
Ibrahim el-Bakraoui was sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison for an attempted robbery at a currency exchange office, according to The New York Times. A year later his brother was sentenced to five years for attempted carjackings.
It was not immediately clear when either had gotten out of prison.
On Friday, police arrested Abdeslam, who said “something major” was being planned in Brussels, according to officials.
Before naming the suspects, Belgian police issued an appeal Wednesday morning for information about the attackers.
The police posted several tweets with the caption “Terrorism: who knows this man?” showing close-ups from closed circuit television of a man pushing a trolley with a suitcase on it through the airport departure hall, along with two men believed to be the bombers.
They gave three slightly different images for the man, who apparently escaped the scene.
He was named Wednesday by Belgium newspaper La Derniere Heure as Laachraoui, 24, and is reportedly also linked to the November Paris attacks.
Last week, Belgian police said they were hunting Laachraoui as a suspected accomplice to Abdeslam. He is believed to have made the suicide vests used in the November attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed, according to a French police official who said Laachraoui’s DNA was found on all of them and in a Brussels apartment where they were made.
Federal prosecutors say Laacharaoui has traveled to Hungary with Abdeslam before the November 13 carnage, and had been traced to safe houses under a false name.
He was checked by guards at the Austria-Hungary border on September 9 while driving in a Mercedes with Abdeslam and one other person, Belgium’s federal prosecutors said in a statement.
Laachraoui, whose nationality wasn’t disclosed, had traveled to Syria in February 2013, prosecutors said. It wasn’t clear when he returned to Europe.
Using a false identity, Laachraoui also rented a house under the name of Soufiane Kayal in the Belgian town of Auvelais that was allegedly used as a safe house, where prosecutors said traces of his DNA were found.
In police raids Tuesday across Belgium, authorities later found a nail-filled bomb, chemical products and an Islamic State flag in a house in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, the state prosecutors’ office said in a statement.