Brussels bomber linked to Paris attacks
BRUSSELS • One of the two men who blew themselves up at Brussels Airport on Tuesday was a bomb maker who helped produce at least two suicide vests used in the attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris on Nov. 13, the Belgian authorities said Friday. He is the most definitive link so far between the two sets of attacks.
The bomb maker — Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian citizen — was an accomplice of Salah Abdeslam, 26, who was captured in Belgium on March 18 after a fourmonth global manhunt and charged with terrorist murder, officials said. Abdeslam is suspected of being the sole surviving direct participant in the Paris attacks, and his arrest appears to have accelerated the plot that culmin- ated in the attack on Brussels, which killed 31 people.
Laachraoui travelled to Syria in February 2013. In September 2015, while using a false identity card, he and Abdeslam were stopped at t he Hungarian- Austrian border but not detained. He rented a house in Auvelais, Belgium, that was used by the attackers, and traces of his DNA were found in an apartment in the Schaerbeek section of Brussels that he used as a bomb-making lab.
On Monday — three days after Abdeslam was captured in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighbourhood where he grew up — the authorities asked for help finding Laachraoui.
But it was too late. At 7:58 a.m. Tuesday, he blew himself up at Brussels Airport, along with another suicide bomber, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, 29.
News agencies had widely reported Laachraoui’s death, but officials awaited DNA results before confirming the news. On Friday, the federal prosecutor in Brussels confirmed the death, and also disclosed that Laachraoui’s DNA had been found on suicide vests that were set off at the Stade de France, north of Paris, and in the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, on Nov. 13.
Laachraoui was one of several central figures linking the Paris and Brussels attacks, and the investigations have widened to encompass other countries and other suspects who are potentially involved in both.
On Thursday night, the police in Dusseldorf, Germany, arrested a 28-year-old German long known to the authorities for having ties to Islamist ex- tremists in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. They were acting to prevent him from fleeing to Syria, a spokesman for the state prosecutor said.
Turkey deported the German man and Ibrahim El Bakraoui to the Netherlands l ast year, German news media and security officials said. “It is not clear whether they knew each other, and, if so, how well,” said Ralf Herrenbruck, a spokesman for the state prosecutor’s office in Dusseldorf. The German man was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison earlier this month for a robbery, but had not yet started his sentence, German officials said.
Also on Friday, German officials disclosed that they had arrested a 28-year-old Moroccan during a routine identity check at a train station in Giessen, near Frankfurt. The police determined that the man had previously applied for asylum in Germany using other aliases, and had a criminal record in Italy.
He had been hospitalized for an unexplained injury on March 18 — the same day that Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels — and carried a cellphone with a text message with the word “fin” ( French for “end”) received on Tuesday, shortly before the attacks in Brussels, the public broadcaster ARD reported. An- other text message contained the name Khalid El Bakraoui, according to the newsweekly Der Spiegel. Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, Ibrahim’s younger brother, blew himself up at a Brussels subway station on Tuesday.
In Spain and the Netherl ands, news agencies reported t hat European i ntelligence authorities were searching for Naim al- Hamed, a 28- year- old Syrian, as part of the investigations into the Brussels attacks. Hamed was said to be linked to Laachraoui, Khalid El Bakraoui and a third suspect, Mohamed Abrini, who is sought by the authorities.
Police operations in France and in Belgium over the last days also have shown that new plots and networks have yet to emerge. On Thursday, the French police arrested Reda Kriket, an ISIL operative who, according to court records, raised money for jihadis in 2012-13 and travelled to Syria in late 2014. Kriket was well known to the security services in both France and Belgium, and he was named in a 2015 court proceeding along with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the on-theground chief planner of the Paris attacks.
After Kriket’s arrest, the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that Kriket had been involved in the “advanced stages” of a new terrorist plot.
It was unclear whether that plot was directly connected to the attacks in Paris or Brussels.