Belgian police shot a suspect as part of a huge European terror crackdown that yielded several arrests Friday as France’s president said a jihadist network that targeted both Paris and Brussels was being “destroyed”.
Grieving Belgians held prayers in the rain in a central Brussels square carpeted with flowers and tributes to the 31 dead and 300 wounded in Tuesday’s carnage, but there was also growing anger at the government for letting a string of militants slip through the net.
The raids came as under-fire Belgian investigators uncovered alarming new evidence of a European jihadist cell tied to bombings at Brussels’ airport and metro, November’s Paris attacks and a new French plot.
“Even if the one that committed the attacks in Paris and Brussels is in the process of being destroyed… there is still a heavy threat,” French President Francois Hollande said.
The Belgian government has admitted “errors” and two ministers offered to resign after Turkey said Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who blew himself up in the airport attack, had been arrested and deported and that Belgium had ignored warnings that he was a “foreign terrorist fighter”.
Ibrahim and his brother Khalid, the suicide bomber in the metro attack, were also on a US counterterrorism watch list, CNN reported.
Ibrahim was on the list even before the November Paris attacks while Khalid was added soon after. Prosecutors have confirmed Khalid was the subject of an international warrant over the Paris attacks.
European authorities are under huge pressure to better coordinate the tracking of homegrown extremists and fighters returning from Syria, as evidence grows of a thriving jihadist network straddling France and Belgium.
A Belgian parliamentary commission on Friday heard from the ministers for justice, foreign affairs and the interior on how Ibrahim El Bakraoui had managed to evade the Belgian authorities.
The ministers said the information from Ankara had been vague but acknowledged a Belgian police officer at the embassy in Turkey had “blundered”.
Suspect shot in leg
French police said they had foiled a terror strike in France by 34-year-old Reda Kriket — a man previously convicted in Belgium in a terror case alongside Paris attacks ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud — after arresting him and discovering explosives at his home.
Belgian police later arrested three people in connection with the new French conspiracy, prosecutors said.
In dramatic scenes, one of the suspects was shot in the leg at a tram stop in broad daylight in a huge operation by police in the Belgian capital’s Schaerbeek district, where police this week found a bomb factory linked to the Brussels attacks.
Deepening the links, Belgian prosecutors revealed that Brussels airport bomber Najim Laachraoui’s DNA was found on a suicide vest and a piece of cloth at the Bataclan concert hall where 90 people were killed during November’s Paris attacks, and on a bomb at the Stade de France stadium.
A huge manhunt is still under way for at least two suspects — one of the airport attackers whose bomb failed to go off and another man seen in the metro with the bomber there.
Investigators also say Khalid El Bakraoui rented an apartment in Brussels used by key Paris suspect Salah Abdeslam, who was taken into custody in the Belgian capital on March 18.
The nation’s federal prosecutor revealed Abdeslam “has invoked his right to silence” and has not spoken to investigators since a few brief interviews the day after his arrest.
‘Covered in blood’
US officials confirmed that two Americans were among the Brussels dead. Secretary of State John Kerry said he stood by the Belgian people, echoing their backing for the United States after the 9/11 attacks.
“Then, voices across Europe declared, ‘Je suis Americain’. Now, we declare, ‘Je suis Bruxellois’ and ‘Ik ben Brussel,’ Kerry said in French and Flemish, the country’s two main languages, after meeting Belgian Premier Charles Michel.
Harrowing stories continued to emerge from survivors of the attacks, in which people of around 40 nationalities were killed or wounded.
Briton David Dixon, 51, who lived in Brussels, texted his aunt after the airport blasts to say he was safe, but happened to be on the metro system when a suicide bomber blew himself up, British media said.
A 19-year-old Mormon missionary was at the Delta airlines check-in counter when the explosions went off at Zaventem.
“My body was actually picked up off the ground for a moment,” Mason Wells told CNN. “My left shoe was blown off and a large part of the right side of my body got really hot and then really cold and I was covered in… a lot of blood that wasn’t mine.”
Officials confirmed the deaths of young Dutch siblings Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski, who were reportedly on the phone with relatives when the airport bomb went off.
Among only three fatalities formally named so far was Peruvian Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz, 37.
A Chinese national was also confirmed among those killed.
Brussels bombings claim casualties from over 40 countries
From Belgians to Americans, Germans and Indians the suicide bombings in Brussels on Tuesday left casualties from more than 40 countries.
At least 31 people were killed and 316 wounded after two bombs exploded at Brussels Airport and one at Maelbeek metro station between the city centre and the European Union headquarters.
Prime Minister Charles Michel said there were more than 40 nationalities among the casualties.
Nine foreigners have been identified so far, a Belgian foreign ministry spokesman said.
“This is a preliminary number, the identification process is still going on and may take some time. We have three Dutch, one Chinese, one Peruvian, two Americans, one Briton, and one French,” spokesman Didier Vanderhasselt said.
Leopold Hecht, a 20-year-old law student at the Saint-Louis University in Brussels, was one of those killed. His Facebook page, headed by the word “Remembering” over a backdrop of Paris, showed snapshots of a young blonde man smiling with his friends or on holidays abroad.
Loubna Lafquiri, a 34-year-old mother of three and a gymnastics teacher at an Islamic school in Brussels, was believed to have been at the metro station and among about 20 people killed during Tuesday’s morning rush hour.
A Dutch brother and sister who lived in New York were also among the dead, their family said on Friday.
They said Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski were not on the list of surviving victims given to family members by Belgian authorities.
Briton David Dixon, a long-time resident in Brussels, died in the Maelbeek bombing, according to the British Foreign Office. A Chinese national was killed in the attacks, state media said, citing the Chinese embassy in Belgium.
Germany on Friday confirmed its first casualty in the Brussels attacks, saying that a German woman had been killed in the bombings at Brussels airport. Police said the woman from Aachen was a dual citizen, declining to name her second citizenship.
Raghavendran Ganesan, who has been working in Belgium on an Infosys project with Belgian telecoms provider Proximus and recently become a father, has also been missing since the attacks, according to a posting on Facebook by his brother Chandrasekar.
Raghavendran usually took the metro on that route at the time the bomb exploded, he said.
Delta Air Lines said its customers were among the fatalities in the deadly blasts at the airport departure hall.
A number of the victims have still not been identified.
Fears rise that nuclear power plants are vulnerable
As a dragnet aimed at Islamic State operatives spiraled across Brussels and into at least five European countries on Friday, the authorities were also focusing on a narrower but increasingly alarming threat: the vulnerability of Belgium’s nuclear power plants.
The investigation into this week’s deadly terror attacks in Brussels has raised fresh alarm that the Islamic State was seeking to attack, infiltrate, sabotage or obtain nuclear or radioactive material in a country with an already troubled history of security lapses at its nuclear facilities, a weak intelligence apparatus, and a deeply rooted terrorist network.
On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers at one of two plants where all non-essential employees were sent home hours after the attacks at the Brussels airport and one of the city’s busiest subway stations three days before.
Surveillance footage of a top official at another Belgian nuclear facility was discovered last year in the apartment of a suspected militant linked to the suicide bombers who unleashed the horror here in Brussels, as well as those who carried out the massacre that killed 130 people in Paris in November.
Asked on Thursday at a London think tank whether there was a danger of the Islamic State’s obtaining a nuclear weapon, the British defense secretary Michael Fallon, said that “was a new and emerging threat.”
While the prospect that terrorists can obtain enough highly enriched uranium and then turn it into a nuclear fission bomb seems far-fetched to many experts, they say the fabrication of some kind of dirty bomb from radioactive waste is more conceivable. There are a variety of other risks involving Belgium’s facilities, including that terrorists somehow shut down the privately operated plants, which provide nearly half of Belgium’s power.
The fears at the nuclear power plants are of “an accident in which someone explodes a bomb inside the plant,” said Sébastien Berg, the spokesman for Belgium’s nuclear energy agency. “The other danger is that they fly something into the plant from outside.” That could stop the cooling process of the used fuel, Mr. Berg explained, and in turn shut down the plant.
The revelation of the surveillance footage was the first evidence that the Islamic State has a focused interest in nuclear material. But Belgium’s facilities have had a worrying track record of breaches, prompting warnings from Washington and other foreign capitals.
Some of these are relatively minor: The Belgiun nuclear agency’s computer system was hacked this year and shut down briefly. In 2013, two individuals managed to scale the fence at Belgium’s research reactor in the city of Mol, break into a laboratory and steal equipment.
Other are far more disconcerting.
Back in 2012, two employees at the nuclear plant in Doel quit to join jihadists fighting in Syria, and eventually transferred their allegiances to the Islamic State. Both men fought in a brigade that counted dozens of Belgians in its ranks, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, considered the architect of the Paris attacks.
One of these men is believed to have died fighting in Syria, but the other was convicted of terror-related offences in Belgium in 2014, and released from prison last year. It is not known whether they communicated information about their former workplace to their comrades in the Islamic State.
At the same plant where these jihadists once worked, an individual who has yet to be identified walked into the humming reactor No. 4 in 2014, turned a valve, and drained 65,000 liters of oil used to lubricate the turbines. The ensuing friction nearly overheated the machinery, forcing it to be immediately shut down. The damage was so severe that the reactor was out of commission for five months.
Investigators are now looking into possible links between that case and terror groups, although they caution that it could also have been the work of an insider with a workplace grudge. What is clear is that the act was meant to sow dangerous havoc — and that the plant’s security systems can be breached.
“This was a deliberate act to take down the nuclear reactor, and a very good way to do it,” Mr. Berg, the nuclear agency spokesman said of the episode in a recent interview.
These incidents are now all being seen in a new light, as information gathered by investigators since Tuesday’s attacks suggest that the same terrorist network that hit Paris and Brussels was in the planning stages of some kind of operation at a Belgian nuclear facility.
Three men linked to the surveillance video were involved in either the Paris or Brussels attacks.
Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, the brothers who the authorities say acted as suicide bombers at the Brussels airport and subway station, are believed to have driven to the surveilled scientist’s home and removed a camera that was hidden in nearby bushes. The authorities say they then brought it to the home of Mohammed Bakkali, a relatively unknown figure who was arrested by the Belgian police after the Paris attacks and is accused of helping with logistics and planning.
Belgium has both low enriched uranium, which fuels its two power plants, and highly enriched uranium, which is used in its research reactor primarily to make medical isotopes, plus the byproducts of that process. The United States provides Belgium with highly enriched uranium — making it particularly concerned about radioactive materials landing in terrorist hands — and then buys isotopes.
Experts say the most remote of the potential nuclear-related risks is that Islamic State operatives would be able to obtain highly enriched uranium. Even the danger of a dirty bomb is limited, they said, because much radioactive waste is so toxic it would likely sicken or kill the people trying to steal it.
Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and editor of the blog Nuclear Diner, said Belgium’s Tihange nuclear plant has pressurized water reactors, inside a heavy steel vessel, reducing the danger that nuclear fuel could leak or spread. She said the Brussels bombers’ explosive of choice, TATP, might be able to damage the reactor but that the most likely outcome would be a meltdown that would turn off the reactor, limiting the radiation damage.
And if terrorists did manage to shut down the reactor, reach the fuel rods, and get the fuel out of them, Ms. Rofer said, it would be “too radioactive to go near, it would kill you right away.
While nuclear experts are doubtful that terrorists could steal the highly enriched uranium at the Mol reactor without alerting law enforcement, some do believe they could recruit people who know how to fashion a nuclear device.
Matthew Bunn, a specialist in nuclear security at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said another worry is the byproducts of the isotopes made at Mol, such as Cesium-137.
“It’s like talcum powder,” he said. “If you made a dirty bomb out of it, it’s going to provoke fear, you would have to evacuate and you have to spend a lot of money cleaning it up; the economic destruction cost could be very high.”
The discovery of the surveillance video in November set off alarm bells across the small nuclear-security community, with fresh worries that terror groups could kidnap, extort or otherwise coerce a nuclear scientist into helping them. The official who was watched works at Mol, one of five research reactors worldwide that produce 90 percent of the isotopes used for medical diagnosis and treatment.
Professor Bunn of Harvard noted that the Islamic State “has an apocalyptic ideology and believes there is going to be a final war with the United States,” expects to win that war, and “ would need very powerful weapons to do so.”
“And if they ever did turn to nuclear weapons,” he added, “they have more people, more money and more territory under their control and more ability to recruit experts globally than Al Qaeda at its best ever had.”
-Reuters/Yahoo