Apartment block provided perfect cover to make volatile explosive for deadly attacks

AN empty apartment block on a quiet street turned out to be the perfect place for the three suicide bombers behind the Brussels attacks to prepare the home-made nail bombs used in Tuesday’s airport and metro attacks.

In a building undergoing renovation, there were no near neighbours to notice them taking in large quantities of strong-smelling household chemicals, as well as a suitcase of nails, to concoct an unstable white explosive powder known as TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, that they used in their attacks.

“Even if someone had stopped them, they could have said the materials were for renovation,” said Hassan Abid, an official at the local town hall.

Having moved in two months ago, brothers Khalid and Brahim el-Bakraoui used the apartment in the largely middleclass borough of Schaer-beek as a laboratory and hideout, from where Brahim and two other men took a taxi on Tuesday morning to the airport to commit their attacks.

Prosecutors uncovered 33lb of TATP, as well as 180 litres of the chemicals needed to make bombs. TATP is a highly volatile explosive but offers no easy trail for intelligence agents to track because buying the ingredients is easily done at any hardware store or pharmacy.

Ehud Keinan, an Israeli scientist who has spent 35 years studying TATP, said that as little as 9lbs could produce the kind of devastation seen in Brussels.

“It is very easy to make, not like a conventional bomb,” said Mr Keinan, dean of chemistry at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

“You don’t need to be part of a large organisation or need training to do this.”

The brothers’ associate Najim Laachraoui, a 25-year-old Belgian who blew himself up in the airport attack and is suspected of making suicide vests for last year’s terror attacks in Paris, had studied engineering at university and excelled in lab work.