The jihadist supercell that rocked Europe
One set of hands behind Paris. The same set of hands behind Brussels. A single set of hands, building the suicide vests and connecting the wires that twice brought the nightmare in Syria and Iraq to the heart of Europe.
And then Tuesday, as Belgian investigators finally closed in, it now appears those hands turned on themselves, ending their deadly capabilities forever in a final explosion at an airport ticketing counter in Brussels.
Such is the picture emerging from Belgium, where police sources on Wednesday confirmed that alleged explosives expert Najim Laachraoui — named Monday as a key suspect in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks — was among the three suicide bombers in Brussels.
Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian-passport holder born in Morocco and raised in the Brussels suburb of Schaerbeek, is now among the firmest links between Paris and Brussels, having left a trail of his DNA on explosive belts in both cities.
Coupled with other revelations culled from a cascading series of terror raids, investigators now are rapidly connecting new dots between the two cities.
The emerging conclusion: The bombing campaigns were the work of a single interconnected jihadist supercell that was able to regroup in the four months between blasts, even after the death of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, its Belgian ringleader, in a shootout days after the Paris attacks.
Belgian investigators also traced the cell’s travels to a critical moment last September, when alleged bomb maker Laachraoui, travelling in a car with Paris attack suspects Salah Abdeslam and Mohamed Belkaid, were able to talk their way through a police stop at the Austria-Hungary border with the help of false identity papers. Presenting himself under the alias Soufiane Kayal, Laachraoui was able to avoid detection despite the existence of an international arrest warrant naming him as a recruiter for Daesh.
While Daesh (also known as ISIS and ISIL) claimed responsibility for both attacks, new clues emerging from Brussels suggest the remnants of the cell may have acted unilaterally, perhaps in desperation, as they mobilized to attack Belgium before police closed in. The Belgian prosecutor on Wednesday outlined a suicide note attributed to Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, one of two Belgian-born brothers who set off suicide belts in Brussels. The message appeared to have been written in the wake of last Friday’s capture in Brussels of Paris attack suspect Abdeslam.
Writing in French on his laptop computer, el-Bakraoui’s angst-filled last words tell of feeling “in a rush, not knowing what to do, being hunt- ed everywhere, not being safe.” And they describe his ultimate dread — of “ending up in a (prison) cell.” The words point more to a man gripped with panic and despair rather than one steeling himself for an explosive end.
Belgian security agencies, having already endured withering criticism in the four months since the fingerprints of the Paris attackers were first traced to Brussels, on Wednesday faced more questions still after revelations that the bomber el-Bakraoui was arrested last summer in Turkey near the Syrian border.
El-Bakraoui was first deported to Holland and then onto Belgium, arriving as a suspect red-flagged by Turkish officials.
But Belgian authorities failed to confirm his suspected links to terrorism “despite our warnings that he was a foreign fighter,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens downplayed the Turkish president’s admonition, saying that elBakraoui was not yet on police scanners for suspected terrorism “but as a common-law criminal who was on conditional release.”
Belgian police were able to raid the Bakraoui brothers’ apartment Tuesday night thanks to a tip from a taxi driver who had unwittingly delivered the bombers to the Brussels airport before becoming suspicious and alerting authorities.
Police described the premises as a de facto bomb-making factory, replete with 15 kilograms of homemade explosives.
Though the taxi driver sounded the alarm too late to save those caught in Tuesday’s blasts, Belgian media reports suggest the onslaught could have been worse — a fourth suitcase, thought to contain yet another bomb, was said to be too big to fit in the taxi and instead was left behind.