Regrets, arrests mark attack aftermath
Authorities look back at lost opportunities, press ahead with roundups, raids
BRUSSELS — Belgian commandos and bomb disposal units swept through a district at the heart of the Brussels attack probe Friday, underscoring widening security fears as prosecutors acknowledged they had missed a chance to press a key terrorist suspect for intelligence in the days before the twin-site suicide bombings.
Even as a trio of suicide bombers were racing to strike, fearing that authorities were closing in on them after the March 18 detention of one of their key allies, Salah Abdeslam, investigators failed to concentrate on interrogating Abdeslam about his knowledge of future attack plots, the prosecutors said Friday. Instead, they ran through a recitation of their understanding of his involvement in the November strikes in Paris that killed 130 people, the prosecutors said.
The conversations took place over two hours on Saturday, and the authorities did not interrogate Abdeslam again until Tuesday, after the attacks, when he refused to speak further, prosecutors said in a statement.
The failure to push Abdeslam for concrete intelligence — even though key associates were known to be on the loose — adds to an emerging picture of failures by intelligence agencies, police forces and criminal investigators to take advantage of opportunities to avert the attacks Tuesday.
Other police operations in France and Germany displayed the expanding reach of an operation that increasingly connects the last two terrorist blows in Europe: November’s bloodshed across Paris and Tuesday’s suicide bombings in Brussels that killed at least 31 people.
Among those arrested in the latest roundups was a French suspect who officials believe was directing a plot for an impending attack in France. The investigation touched off a series of related police raids in Belgium.
One large raid appeared to concentrate on the Brussels district of Schaerbeek, the same area where some of the attackers stayed and where police later found an apartment filled with bombmaking material.
Police detained one person, the Belgian federal prosecutor said in a statement, and witnesses reported hearing explosions, apparently from bomb squad robots.
Belgian TV aired amateur footage of the detention that appeared to show a man who had been shot in the leg being dragged away from a tram stop by black-clad counterterrorism police while a bomb-disposal robot waited nearby. Belgian prosecutors said the man was arrested in connection with a French raid a day earlier.
Belgium’s federal prosecutor said Friday that a man detained in a raid the previous night in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil is believed to have connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the deceased ringleader of November’s Paris attacks. The 34-yearold French citizen, Reda Kriket, had been convicted in a Belgian court in July for participating in the activities of a terrorist group, the prosecutor said. Three more raids in Brussels were conducted in connection with Kriket’s arrest, according to the prosecutor.
Earlier, a new suspect in the attacks was identified as Naim al-Hamed, a 27-year-old Syrian man born in Hama.