THE AFTERSHOCKS OF THE TRIPLE BOMBING IN BRUSSELS CONTINUE TO REVERBERATE AS TWO MINISTERS ACKNOWLEDGE THEY BLUNDERED BY FAILING TO ARREST A SUSPECTED TERRORIST, MATTHEW FISHER REPORTS.
Bertrand Michou did not see or hear the explosions that ripped through a metro station 100 metres from his sandwich shop.
But he felt “the tremors” from Tuesday’s blast and observed “la panique” that ensued as hundreds of people “ran from every direction” in the maze of gleaming steel and glass office towers of the European Union in the heart of the Belgian capital.
The terrorists’ goal was to paralyze and terrorize Brussels. Two days later, they continue to have succeeded. There is something like a state of siege here, especially in predominately Arab districts as soldiers and police in combat gear search frantically for accomplices.
On Thursday, six people were detained in police raids in central Brussels, Jette and the Schaerbeek neighbourhood.
It was in an apartment in Schaerbeek that police found a stash of explosives and other bomb- making material earlier this week believed used by the suicide bombers.
Watching one armed patrol in Molenbeek, where several of the terrorists were born and raised, a woman of Moroccan descent said, “People now feel safer ( in Morocco) than they do here.”
A man walking beside her said he had come to Belgium “to avoid terrorism, but it has followed me here.”
The aftershocks from the metro attack and blasts at the Brussels airport are continuing to reverberate across the city and the Continent.
As cleaners and engineers began to cart away mountains of rubble created by the explosions, much of the panic now is political: it has become more and more obvious the same cell that carried out terrorist acts in Paris last November was involved in the Brussels bombings.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens and Interior Minister Jan Jambon offered to resign Thursday after confirming their departments had ignored or mishandled information from Turkey about one of the terrorists involved in this week’s bombings. They also failed to note links between the Paris and Brussels bombers.
There had been “errors” committed and a “major question” should be asked about what went wrong, Jambon said.
But Prime Minister Charles Michel refused to accept their resignations, saying, “In ( a) time of war, you cannot leave the field.”
Thursday, Jambon chaired an emergency meeting of EU security ministers. On the agenda: addressing mounting criticism of how their governments share — or, rather, often do not share — intelligence, and how this has allowed terrorists to travel from one country to another.
The sometimes banal minutiae that explain how proficient and diabolical the Brussels killers were slowly began to emerge.
The death toll remains at 31, but is still expected to rise: these were big bombs, packed with nails designed to cause horrific injuries.
Of the 270 wounded, 61 are listed as being in critical condition. Some are so disfigured, their entire bodies are swaddled in bandages and dressings, making it hard to identify them.
This has caused angry relatives of the missing to demand they be allowed into hospital wards to check for themselves.
Coroners have also been unable to identify several of the dead, causing extreme anxiety for families, including those of any American serving with U. S. forces in Europe who has not been seen or heard from since the attacks.
It could have been far worse. The largest of the three improvised explosive devices at the airport failed to go off. That bit of luck saved lives and has given investigators an unexpected chance to admire the apparent talent of the bomb maker.
It will not be much of a Easter weekend in Brussels. The airport will remain closed until at least Monday. Large parts of the metro network that run through the middle of the city will not open for several weeks, despite armies of cleanup crews, engineers and painters being sent below ground.
Rigorous airport- style security checks have been instituted at train stations. This has forced thousands of travellers to wait in the street for hours to funnel through the few entrances that are open.
Watching this unhappy group of potential victims crowded together in a public space has obviously created a new security nightmare.
“It was not our idea to turn all these people into targets” was the terse explanation of a policeman armed with a machine gun who was responsible for keeping them safe.
As with so many security measures imposed immediately after terrorist attacks, the new procedures seemed ridiculous when travellers arriving on trains from Germany, the Netherlands and small stations in Belgium had not been checked at all.
Despite growing frustration with the additional security measures in what has been one of the world’s most open capitals, the dragnet in one Arab district is likely to tighten further.
One of those urgently being sought is a childhood friend of Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested after a shootout with police in Brussels last week.
Abdeslam is facing charges in France for his part in the Paris attacks and is also known to have been friendly with several men allegedly involved in the attacks in Belgium.
Waiving his right to avoid extradition Thursday, he said through his lawyer he was prepared to leave immediately to face trial in France.