Fear, defiance in Brussels a day after attacks; bombers named
One of two men who blew themselves up at Brussels airport had left a will on a computer dumped in a rubbish bin
BRUSSELS: Brussels resident Aurelie Cardon says she will avoid taking the metro from now on. Or maybe move abroad.
Her eardrums were perforated when a bomb exploded in the metro carriage next to hers on Tuesday and doctors had to pull a piece of burned plastic out of the corner of her eye. “There will be other attacks, so I want to find a way not to take this (metro) line anymore. Maybe I’ll buy a bike or a motorcycle,” she told Reuters from hospital, using Facebook because she cannot hear.
A day after 31 people were killed and 260 injured in attacks on the Maelbeek underground railway station and the Zaventem airport, the mood was a mixture of shock and defiance in the eerily quiet city of 1.2 million people, headquarters to the European Union and NATO.
“What happened yesterday was really horrible. As a citizen of Brussels, it really hurts to experience something like this... But we are not going to let our lives be dictated by the terrorists,” said Linda van den Bosche, who lives in an apartment next to the Maelbeek station. Across the city, people laid flowers and candles at memorials. During a minute of silence, one man held a copy of a newspaper front page reading “Hang in there!”
On the unusually quiet Grand Place in the city centre, British visitors Darren Smith, 45, and Anne Stocks, 46, said they would carry on with their trip as planned.
“We were due to stay until Friday and we’ll stay until Friday,” Stocks said. “You just have to carry on, what happened is really horrible but you can’t just stay indoors because you worry it could happen again.” But there were worries about the impact on local businesses. In the middle of the cobbled square, horse-drawn carriage driver Thibault Dantine, 46, said trade was slow. “There would usually be much more people,” he said. “I’m very worried for the future, I’m afraid tourists won’t come back,” he said, a Belgian flag flying from his carriage. Dantine said the tourism sector in Brussels had only just begun to recover from a tough winter following a five-day security lockdown in November, when Brussels feared an attack similar to the assault that killed 130 people in Paris.
Frustrated
Authorities in the Belgian capital struck a more defiant note on Wednesday, acknowledging that closing shops, schools and public services last year had frustrated residents. “It’s important to draw lessons from the lockdown in November. It’s no longer an option today when we want to show that the state is stronger than events... Brussels continues to function,” said the head of the Brussels regional government, Rudi Vervoort.
Some residents agreed, but said authorities needed to do more. “It’s right we are not in lockdown again. That clearly didn’t solve anything,” said Jean Vermeren, an instructor at a local swimming pool that was open as normal. “What we need is more intelligence. Belgium can’t be a black hole anymore.”
Meanwhile, Belgium’s chief prosecutor named two brothers on Wednesday as IS suicide bombers but said another key suspect was on the run.
The federal prosecutor told a news conference that Ibrahim El Bakraoui, 29, one of two men who blew themselves up at Brussels airport on Tuesday, had left a will on a computer dumped in a rubbish bin near the militants’ hideout.
In it, he described himself as “always on the run, not knowing what to do anymore, being hunted everywhere, not being safe any longer and that if he hangs around, he risks ending up next to the person in a cell” - a reference to suspected Paris bomber Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested last week.
His brother Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, detonated a bomb an hour later on a crowded rush-hour metro train near the European Com- mission headquarters, prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said.
Both men, born in Belgium, had criminal records for armed robbery but were not previously linked by investigators to Islamist militants.
The Bakraoui brothers were identified by their fingerprints and on security cameras, the prosecutor said. The second suicide bomber at the airport had yet to be identified and a third man, whom he did not name, had left the biggest bomb and run out of the terminal before the explosions.
Belgian media named that man as Najim Laachraoui, 25, a suspected IS recruiter and bombmaker whose DNA was found on two explosives belts used in last November’s Paris attacks and at a Brussels safe house used by Abdeslam before his arrest last Friday.
Some media reported he had been captured in the Brussels borough of Anderlecht, but they later said the person detained was not Laachraoui.
Khalid El Bakraoui had rented under a false name the apartment in the city’s Forest borough, where police hunting Abdeslam killed a gunman in a raid last week. He is also believed to have rented a safe house in the southern Belgian city of Charleroi used to mount the Paris attacks. A minute’s silence was observed across Belgium at noon. Prime Minister Charles Michel cancelled a trip to China and reviewed security measures with his inner cabinet before attending a memorial event at European Commission headquarters with King Philippe, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We are determined, admittedly with a strong feeling of pain in our stomachs, but determined to act,” Michel told a joint news conference with Valls. “France and Belgium are united in pain more than ever.”
Valls played down cross-border sniping over security, saying: “We must turn the page on naivete, a form of carefreeness that our societies have known.
“It is Europe that has been attacked. The response to terrorism must be European.”