Belgian authorities: Brothers carried out Islamic State suicide attacks
BRUSSELS - Authorities uncovered bomb material and a farewell message from a suspected suicide bomber Wednesday as details emerged of the Brussels attackers: two brothers who brought chaos and carnage to the city at the heart of European unity.
One person was taken into custody, then released, as authorities tried to chase down possible leads for a key suspect on the run.
But the brothers - Khalid and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, both Belgians with criminal records - were identified by authorities as suicide bombers who attacked the Brussels metro and airport on Tuesday, claiming at least 31 lives and injuring 270 people. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.
The pair also opened links to last year's Paris massacres. Authorities believe both had connections to Salah Abdeslam, who helped carry out the bloody siege in November and was apprehended last week by Belgian authorities.
The probes increasingly suggest a web that draws together the Paris plot - hatched mostly in Brussels - and Tuesday's blasts that struck in the shadows of offices directing the Western alliance NATO and the European Union.
As part of the manhunt and investigations, security officials found a will in a trash can at the apartment of Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, the elder brother. It read: "I would rather die than end up in a cell."
He is suspected of perpetrating a suicide attack at the airport. The younger brother was identified by his fingerprints in the metro attack, prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said.
Officials also found a vast cache of bomb-making materials in Ibrahim el-Bakraoui's apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels: 33 pounds of TATP explosives, nearly 40 gallons of acetone, detonators and a suitcase full of nails, the prosecutor said.
One of the brothers, said a Belgian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, had used a false name to rent an apartment in Forest neighborhood of Brussels that was raided on March 15. Abdeslam's fingerprints were found there, providing the vital clue that helped lead to his arrest.
Belgian media initially reported that a suspect arrested Wednesday was 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui, whom European security officials have described as a suspected Islamic State bombmaker. But those reports were later retracted, and Van Leeuw said Laachraoui was still being sought.
Laachraoui remained a target of the manhunt, however, and his DNA was found on at least one bomb used in the Paris attacks.
In further signs of jitters across Belgium, sports officials called off a soccer match between Belgium and Portugal scheduled for Tuesday in Brussels "because of security concerns." Brussels Airport will remain closed at least through Thursday, officials said.
Laachraoui, a Belgian who was born in Morocco and raised in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, is believed to have trained in Syria and then returned to Europe.
His DNA was found on one of the explosive belts from November's Paris attacks, and he is thought to have traveled at one point with Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect believed to have played a direct role in the Paris massacre. Abdeslam was captured Friday in a raid on an apartment building in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels.
Tuesday's mass killings added Brussels to a somber list of European capitals that have been struck in the past year by deadly attacks either perpetrated or inspired by the Islamic State, including Paris and Copenhagen.
Authorities had been bracing for an attack in Belgium for months as the country has struggled to stem a tide of homegrown extremism and as the Islamic State has repeatedly threatened to hit Europe in its core.
But when the attacks finally came, the magnitude was stunning. The day's violence represented the worst on Belgian soil since World War II.
"What we had feared has happened," said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. "This is a black moment for our country."
The apparently coordinated explosions created a renewed sense of threat that spilled far beyond Brussels, as authorities boosted police patrols in cities such as Paris, London and Washington.
The targets in Brussels - home of the European Union and NATO - appeared to have been chosen for their symbolic value and for their ease of access.
The attackers first struck with twin bombings at the international airport, where early-morning travelers were preparing to board flights linking Brussels to cities across the continent and around the world. An hour later, a subway car transiting beneath the modernist glass-and-steel high-rises that house the E.U. erupted in smoke and flame.
Some of the injured lost limbs as shrapnel from the blasts radiated through packed crowds. Cellphone video recorded in the minutes after the airport blasts showed children cowering on a bloody floor amid the maimed and the dead.
Images from a subway station revealed desperate scenes as people dressed for a day's work stumbled from the mangled wreckage into a smoke-drenched tunnel.
Authorities acknowledged that they had been readying for an attack. But nothing like this, they said.
"We never could have imagined something of this scale," Interior Minister Jan Jambon told Belgian television station RTL.
And even as the country tried to recover from the trauma of Tuesday's strikes, there was evidence that more could be on the way.
The man being sought by police accompanied two of the bombers to the airport, according to a senior Belgian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the case. The taxi driver who transported them said they were hauling particularly heavy luggage that investigators believe was packed with explosives.
The taxi driver who drove the men to the airport later led police to an apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels, where investigators found explosive devices loaded with nails and chemicals, along with an Islamic State flag.
"It was exactly the same type of bomb as at the airport," the senior official said.
Belgian police released surveillance images of three men pushing luggage carts at Brussels Airport. The prosecutor's office said two of them - dressed in black with black gloves on their left hands, probably to conceal detonators - had blown themselves up. But the third, dressed in white, was on the loose.
Within hours of Tuesday's assault, the Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attacks, according to a statement posted on the Amaq Agency, a website believed to be close to the extremist group. The message said Belgium was targeted because of its participation in an international coalition battling the group in Syria and Iraq. U.S. and European security officials said they believed the claim to be credible.
In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said U.S. citizens were among the injured, but he would not say how many. No Americans are known to have died in the attacks, although that information may change, he said.
The State Department also issued an alert on traveling in Europe, urging Americans to avoid crowded places and to exercise caution during religious holidays and at large festivals or events.
Europe has struggled mightily with spillover from the churning conflict in Syria. Thousands of European citizens have traveled there to fight in a war that has become a focal point for jihadists around the world. Many have returned to Europe radicalized. Europe has vowed to confront them.
"This is a kind of scenario every capital in Europe feared since the November attacks last year. A mixture of foreign fighters coming back with experience, local sympathizers on the other hand," said Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University who has advised the Belgian government on how to fight radicalization. "You have such a large number of soft targets, and you cannot secure all of them."
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Birnbaum reported from Moscow. The Washington Post's James McAuley and Anthony Faiola in Brussels, Daniela Deane and Karla Adam in London, and Brian Murphy, Carol Morello and Matt Zapotosky in Washington contributed to this report.