Tag Archives: Belgium

Year on from bombings, Brussels remains on alert

People take part in a rally called "The march against the fear, Tous Ensemble, Samen Een, All Together" in memory for the victims of bomb attacks in Brussels metro and Brussels international airport of Zaventem, in Brussels, Belgium, April 17, 2016. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo

By Robert-Jan Bartunek and Alastair Macdonald

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A year after Islamic State suicide bombers killed 32 people in Brussels, Belgian authorities say much remains unclear about who ordered the attacks, even if those who staged them are either dead or in jail.

The March 22 bloodshed in Brussels hit Zaventem airport and a metro train, coming four months after bombings and shootings in Paris that killed 130 people. Both sets of attacks were carried out by related cells of young Muslims, some of whom had returned from fighting in Syria.

Since then, Belgium has remained on high alert as it tries to curtail threats both at home and from militants who may return from the Middle East.

“We will only have certainty when the situation in Syria and Iraq is resolved,” one senior official said of the inquiries into the Brussels attacks. Those two countries have attracted over 400 Belgians to join the ranks of Islamist militants, according to a study by the Hague-based International Centre for Counter-Terrorism.

That figure makes Belgium one of the biggest contributors to foreign jihadists in the Middle East in proportion to its population.

As the Belgian capital prepares to mark Wednesday’s anniversary with ceremonies timed to the moment the bombers struck, authorities are still unsure just who in the IS group organized and ordered the attacks, even though 59 people are in custody and 60 on bail.

The most recent arrest was in January, of a man suspected of providing forged identity papers to Khalid El Bakraoui, the 27-year-old suicide bomber who killed 16 people on a train at the downtown Maelbeek metro station.

With soldiers still a permanent presence around Brussels’ transportation hubs, security officials told reporters in briefings ahead of the anniversary that there was still a risk that armed militants were still at large.

For Belgian security services, some communities can remain hard to penetrate, such as the tight-knit Muslim neighborhood of Molenbeek where the prime suspect of the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam, hid near his family home for four months. His arrest triggered his associates to strike Brussels four days later.

Despite efforts to detect and discourage the influence of violent Islamist ideas, young men who engaged in petty crime remain vulnerable to it, officials said. But surveillance over potential jihadists has intensified in the past year, they added

Only five Belgians were detected trying to leave for Syria last year, with only one succeeding, officials said, marking a contrast from the previous years.

That, however, has raised concerns, a senior security official told reporters, since Islamic State appeared to be issuing instructions to followers to “attack infidels at home”.

Some 160 Belgian citizens remain in Syria, officials estimate, but some 80 children have been born to them there, creating fears of a new risk.

“These children could be tomorrow’s danger,” the official said. “They’ve seen atrocities, they’ve been brainwashed. Some of them already received military training. We really have to work with them on their return.”

(Reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Robert-Jan Bartunek; Edited by Vin Shahrestani; @macdonaldrtr)

Belgian police alerted to IS Fighters en route to Europe

A Belgian police officer patrols near an apartment building during the reconstruction of the recent attacks, in the Brussels

By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian police have received an anti-terror alert warning that a group of Islamic State fighters recently left Syria en route for Europe planning attacks in Belgium and France, a Belgian security source said on Wednesday.

The Belgian crisis center in charge of coordinating security responses said an alert had been circulated to all police forces in the country but there were no immediate plans to raise the security level to the maximum that would indicate an imminent threat of an attack.

A source at France’s Interior Ministry said Belgian authorities had transmitted a note to their French counterparts, who were currently reviewing the information in the alert. “We know the threat is very high,” the source said. “We’re reviewing all the elements (in the alert).”

Newspaper DH quoted the alert from Belgium’s anti-terror cell as saying the group “left Syria about a week and a half ago aiming to reach Europe via Turkey and Greece by boat without passports”, without giving an exact departure date.

The Belgian security source confirmed the contents of the alert. The Belgian federal police declined to comment and the French source could not confirm the content.

DH said the fighters were armed and aimed to split into two units, one aiming to carry out attacks in Belgium, the other in France. Potential targets in Belgium included a shopping center, a fast-food restaurant and a police station.

It mentioned no specific targets in France, which is hosting the Euro 2016 soccer championships in 10 stadiums across the country until July 10. Some 2.5 million spectators are expected to watch the 51 matches.

“We know there are fighters who are coming back (to Europe),” French government spokesman Stephane Le Foll told a news conference on Wednesday, adding he could not confirm the specific alert from Belgium.

The alert came two days after an attacker who pledged allegiance to Islamic State killed a French police commander and his partner at their home outside Paris, and four days after a gunman declaring loyalty to the Islamist militant group massacred 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

NO CHANGE IN SECURITY LEVEL

Belgian authorities raised the threat level for the capital Brussels to the maximum of four shortly after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 people and after suicide bombers killed 32 people at Brussels airport and on the city’s metro on March 22. The status was lowered on each occasion after a few days.

Belgian police have arrested a number of men of Moroccan origin suspected of direct or indirect involvement in the Paris and Brussels attacks.

A spokesman for the Belgian crisis center said that despite the latest alert, the body that sets the security level did not have any indication of an imminent threat.

“We are still at level three, which refers to a threat that is serious, and we have been at this level since November,” he said. “It is true that you should be careful in areas with large concentrations of people… Security has already been reinforced at all these targets. For now, there has not been a change.”

(Additional reporting by Chine Labbe, Elizabeth Pineau and Jean-Baptiste Vey in Paris,; Editing by Ingrid Melander and Gareth Jones)

U.S. frustration simmers over Belgium’s struggle with militant threat

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Shortly after last November’s attacks on Paris by a Brussels-based Islamic State cell, a top U.S. counter-terrorism official traveling in Europe wanted to visit Brussels to learn more about the investigation.

When the official tried to arrange meetings, however, his Belgian counterparts were not welcoming, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. The Belgians indicated it was a bad time to speak to foreign officials as they were too busy with the investigation, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.

Belgian officials declined to comment on the incident.

The brush-off was one small sign of mounting U.S. frustration over Brussels’ handling of its worsening Islamic militant threat.

Concern that the small European nation’s security and intelligence officials are overwhelmed — and that its coordination with allies falls short — have again come to the fore following the Islamic State-claimed attacks on Tuesday that killed at least 31 people.

Several U.S. officials say that security cooperation has been hampered by patchy intelligence–sharing by Brussels and wide differences in the willingness of different agencies to work with foreign countries, even close allies.

One U.S. government source said that when American investigators try to contact Belgian agencies for information, they often struggle to find which agency or part of an agency might have relevant information.

Belgium has ordered a sharp increase in security budgets following the Paris attacks, despite being under steady pressure to limit its debt levels under euro zone rules. The government has promised to recruit around 2,500 more federal police, who pursue major crimes, to make up for a shortfall of close to a fifth of the full-strength force of 12,500.

It also says it thwarted a major attack in January 2015, and is eager to cooperate with European and U.S. counterparts.

“These attacks show that more coordination with the United States is clearly desirable,” Guy Rapaille, the president of the committee that provides oversight of Belgium’s security and intelligence services, told Belgium’s state broadcaster RTBF.

“But you have to remember that big powers guard their intelligence very closely.”

U.S. officials acknowledge the recent Belgian efforts to step up funding and recruitment.

Yet they say Belgian security services are outmatched by the threat in a country that, per capita, has supplied the highest number of foreign fighters to Syria of any European nation.

“They’re way behind the ball and they’re paying a terrible price,” Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told Reuters.

Asked on Wednesday whether Belgium was too complacent over the threat posed by Islamic militancy, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said:

“I want to stay clear of saying that Belgium was somehow caught by surprise or not aware. You know, we collaborate, we work with Belgium closely.”

Some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say much of the gap between Washington and Belgium — and some other European countries — is cultural. Europeans’ deeper commitment to personal privacy sometimes prevents or delays sharing of information such as travel data — that is taken for granted in the United States.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government radically reshaped its counter-terrorism agencies. It broke down walls between law enforcement and intelligence authorities, and created new coordinating institutions such as the Director of National Intelligence and National Counterterrorism Center.

Belgium, by contrast, is a patchwork country divided between French and Dutch speakers and with multiple levels of government.

Belgian security chiefs have repeatedly complained that they cannot handle up to 900 home-grown Islamist militants, among the highest per-capita rates in Europe. Belgium does not divulge the exact number of personnel in its security services and military intelligence, but security experts say they appear under-resourced compared to European counterparts.

“Add to that the problem of two languages (French and Flemish), lack of Arabic speakers, and weak coordination between national and local government, you have a huge discrepancy between threat and response,” said former CIA official and White House advisor Bruce Riedel, now at the Brookings Institution.

(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom and Jonathan Landay in Washington, Robin Emmott and Alastair Macdonald in Brussels; Writing by Warren Strobel; editing by Don Durfee and Stuart Grudgings)

Brussels airport bombing may have targeted Americans, U.S. lawmaker says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The suicide bombers behind the Brussels attacks may have attempted to target Americans, the top lawmaker on the intelligence committee in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Wednesday.

Representative Devin Nunes of California said the explosion at Brussels airport on Tuesday was close to U.S. airline counters and the metro station targeted was close to the U.S. embassy.

“From my vantage point it does look like an attack on Americans. It looks like it was targeted toward Americans to some degree,” Nunes told reporters.

Nunes, who has been briefed by U.S. intelligence agencies several times since the attacks, said it appeared likely that the bombers were connected to the arrest of a surviving suspect of last November’s attacks in Paris, identified as Salah Abdeslam.

“We don’t want to be definitive, but it appears like this group had connections to the arrest that was made a few days ago,” the Republican lawmaker said.

But he said it was too early to know whether the “good theory” that the plot was accelerated by Abdeslam’s arrest is true. He said he did not believe the cell was contained and that it was much larger than the attackers who have come to light.

Nunes stressed that it is early in the investigation, and too soon to answer questions such as whether Islamic State leaders in Syria had planned the attacks, whether the attackers had relied on encrypted communications or to identify a third attacker believed to be on the loose.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies were working with Belgium.

“It’s a small country. You’ve got a huge influx of radicals who have been moving into there. It’s seen as … safer than the other locations because the police force is small, so we are working with them as are our other allies to improve their capabilities and share intelligence,” Nunes said.

He said a sufficient number of law enforcement personnel were needed to track militant suspects who could number in the hundreds. “It’s easy to lose track if you’re not on top of them.”

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Grant McCool)

Atlanta airport evacuated as U.S. on alert after Brussels attacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Atlanta’s airport was briefly evacuated on Wednesday over a suspicious package while U.S. law enforcement agencies and travelers were on edge a day after deadly suicide bombings by Islamist militants rocked Brussels.

Passengers were ordered out of public areas of the domestic terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the United States’ busiest by passenger volume, but the site was quickly cleared and operations resumed, airport officials said.

Parts of Denver airport were also evacuated on Tuesday, hours after at least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train, as airports across the United States tightened security.

U.S. officials were trying to find Americans missing after the attacks, which the officials said injured about a dozen U.S. citizens including three Mormon missionaries, a U.S. Air Force airman, and four members of his family.

Among those missing were U.S. government personnel, a State Department spokesman told reporters in Washington.

“We still have not accounted for every official U.S. government employee or their family members on the ground,” said the spokesman, Mark Toner. “Partly that reflects the size of the mission or three missions: there’s a bilateral mission, there’s a mission to the EU, as well as a mission to NATO.”

The situation, Toner added, remains “very fluid.” He could not confirm whether any Americans were killed.

Representative Devin Nunes of California, chairman of the U.S. House intelligence committee, said the attacks may have been aimed at U.S. citizens, noting that the airport blast struck close to U.S. airline counters and that the metro station hit was near the U.S. embassy.

“It looks like it was targeted toward Americans to some degree,” Nunes told reporters.

Apart from the eight Americans confirmed as wounded, U.S. media reported on Wednesday that relatives of at least four other Americans who had been traveling in Belgium were still trying to track them down.

Husband and wife Justin and Stephanie Shults, originally from Tennessee and Kentucky, respectively, but now living in Belgium, have not been heard from since they dropped a relative at the airport shortly before the blasts, a family member said.

“We haven’t been able to contact them going on 30 hours,” Justin Shults’ brother, Levi Sutton, told Reuters in a Facebook message. “Stephanie’s mom is fine but she was separated from Justin and Stephanie.”

DEATH TOLL COULD RISE

Sister and brother Sascha and Alexander Pinczowski, who had been living in New York, remain unaccounted for, the New York Daily News reported. The Pinczowskis’ citizenship was unclear. A woman who identified herself on social media as Alexander Pinczowski’s girlfriend said she had been unable to contact him since Tuesday morning.

Belgian officials have said the death toll could increase because some victims at the subway station were blown to pieces and hard to identify, and several survivors were in critical condition.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said on Wednesday that one of its missionaries, Richard Norby, 66, was in a medically-induced coma after lengthy surgery to address shrapnel wounds and second-degree burns.

The attacks sent shockwaves across Europe and around the world, with authorities racing to review security at airports and on public transport systems.

Islamic State, which controls areas of Syria and Iraq and has sympathizers worldwide, claimed responsibility for the Brussels bombings, fueling debate and controversy in the United States about how to stop such attacks.

U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said the United States and Europe should take a “harder look” at protocols at airports and other “soft sites” outside security perimeters.

U.S. Republican presidential campaign hopeful Donald Trump has advocated torturing militant suspects to obtain information, while another Republican candidate, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, called for heightened police scrutiny of neighborhoods with large Muslim populations.

President Barack Obama, a Democrat, rejected singling out Muslims and said while on a visit to Argentina that any such approach “is not only wrong and un-American, but it also would be counterproductive because it would reduce the strength, the antibodies that we have to resist the terrorism.”

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden said the United States was offering Belgium all assistance to help bring the bombers to justice. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Belgium on Friday, a State Department spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Megan Cassella, Amanda Becker and Susan Heavey in Washington, Barbara Goldberg in New York, Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago, Jeff Mason in Buenos Aires; Writing by Scott Malone and Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott and Grant McCool)

United States to press Russia on future of Syria’s Assad

MOSCOW/GENEVA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to press President Vladimir Putin on how Russia sees a future political transition in Syria and the fate of President Bashar al-Assad.

With a fragile truce in place in Syria and warring sides attending peace talks in Geneva, Kerry wants to “get down to brass tacks” on the question of Assad’s future, a State Department official said.

While the United States want Assad to step aside, Russia says only the Syrian people can decide his fate at the ballot box and has bristled at any talk of regime change.

Kerry is holding talks with Putin at the Kremlin on Thursday, in a meeting arranged after the Russian leader’s surprise announcement on March 14 that he was partially withdrawing his forces from Syria.

“The Secretary would like to now really hear where President Putin is in his thinking … on a political transition” in Syria, the official said as Kerry arrived in Moscow.

“Obviously what we are looking for, and what we have been looking for, is how we are going to transition Syria away from Assad’s leadership,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

After five years of conflict that has killed over 250,000 people and caused the world’s worst refugee crisis, Washington and Moscow reached a deal three weeks ago for a cessation of hostilities and delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged areas.

The State Department official said meetings with Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would evaluate the status of the ceasefire and try to “get on the same page” about ending violations and increasing humanitarian assistance.

UNILATERAL THREAT

Russia this week threatened to act unilaterally against those who violate the ceasefire unless it reached a deal with the United States on ways to detect and prevent truce breaches.

The Syrian opposition has accused government forces of renewing sieges and stepping up a campaign of barrel-bombing across the country.

In Geneva, where warring sides are a week into talks on ending the conflict, government officials have rejected any discussion on the fate of Assad, who opposition leaders say must go as part of any transition.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Syria peace talks were always going to be long and difficult, and it was too early to talk about patience running out on any side.

U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Tuesday he hoped the U.S-Russia meeting would give an impetus to the peace talks where the divisive issue of a political transition is stalling progress.

But the State Department official played down expectations that the meeting would have an immediate impact on the talks, which adjourn on Thursday with the next round expected in early April.

A Syrian activist at the talks, Jihad Makdissi, said de Mistura was planning to issue a paper on a “potential common vision”.

The Syrian government delegation said the U.N. envoy had handed them a document which they would study on their return to Damascus. No details of either paper were disclosed.

However, the United Nations said the Syrian government had given verbal assurances that aid convoys can go into three or four areas that its forces are besieging.

U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland said the United Nations had been allowed to enter eight or nine of the 11 areas it had asked to supply with aid, including three or four besieged areas.

But it had not been allowed to go into the town of Daraya, where the World Food Programme has said some people have been reduced to eating grass.

PALMYRA OFFENSIVE

On the battlefield, Syrian government forces and their allies were reported to have pushed forward against Islamic State fighters to reach the outskirts of the historic city of Palmyra on Wednesday.

State news agency SANA quoted a military source who said the army and allied militia advanced in the hills outside Palmyra and toward a road junction “after eliminating the last terrorist Daesh groups there”, referring to Islamic State fighters. Islamic State is not covered by the truce agreement.

The Syrian army is trying to recapture Palmyra, which Islamic State seized in May, to open a road to the mostly IS-held eastern province of Deir al-Zor.

Clashes raged around Palmyra after government forces took control of most of a nearby hill with air cover from Syrian and Russian warplanes, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Russia has withdrawn around half of its air force in Syria, according to Reuters calculations based on state TV footage, some of which was not broadcast.

But Moscow has maintained a group of Su-24 bombers at its Latakia air base and deployed a number of advanced attack helicopters, meaning it is able to continue a reduced number of air strikes in the country.

Operating from Russia’s Shayrat air base southeast of Homs, the helicopter force will be used to secure territory gains around Aleppo and support the Syrian army offensive against Islamic State in Palmyra, Western officials said.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov, Jack Stubbs, John Davison, Dominic Evans, Stephanie Nebehay and Tom Miles; Writing by Giles Elgood, editing by Peter Millership)

Belgium names Brussels bomber brothers, key suspect on run

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgium’s chief prosecutor named two brothers on Wednesday as Islamic State suicide bombers who killed at least 31 people in the most deadly attacks in Brussels’ history but said another key suspect was on the run.

Tuesday’s attacks on a city that is home to the European Union and NATO sent shockwaves across Europe and around the world, with authorities racing to review security at airports and on public transport. It also rekindled debate about lagging European security cooperation and flaws in police surveillance.

Washington announced that Secretary of State John Kerry would visit Belgium on Friday to demonstrate support.

The Belgian 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 Commission headquarters, prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said.

Both men, born in Belgium, had criminal records for armed robbery but investigators had not linked them to Islamist militants until Abdeslam’s arrest, when police began a race against time to track down his suspected accomplices.

That seems to have prompted the bombers to rush into an attack in Belgium after months of lying low, according to the testament found on the laptop.

At least 31 people were killed and 271 wounded in the attacks, the prosecutor said. That toll could increase further because some of the bomb victims at Maelbeek metro station were blown to pieces and victims are hard to identify. Several survivors were still in critical condition.

The Bakraoui brothers were identified by their fingerprints and on security cameras, the prosecutor said. A 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 ran out of the terminal before the explosions.

Belgian media named that man as Najim Laachraoui, 25, a suspected Islamic State recruiter and bomb-maker whose DNA was found on two explosives belts used in last November’s Paris attacks and at a Brussels safe house used by Abdeslam.

De Standaard newspaper, however, citing an unidentified source, named Laachraoui as the second suicide bomber at the airport.

Khalid El Bakraoui 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.

“BLACK DAYS”

Turkey said it had detained Ibrahim El Bakraoui near the Syrian border last year and deported him to the Netherlands before he was briefly held in Belgium, then released. “Belgium ignored our warning that this person is a foreign fighter,” President Tayyip Erdogan said.

The Brussels attacks came days after a suspected Islamic State suicide bomber blew himself up in Istanbul’s most popular shopping district, killing three Israelis and an Iranian.

The Syrian-based Islamist group claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attacks, warning of “black days” for those fighting it in Syria and Iraq. Belgian warplanes have joined the coalition in the Middle East, but Brussels has long been a hub of Islamist militants who operated elsewhere.

A minute’s silence was observed across Belgium at noon. Prime Minister Charles Michel canceled 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.”

EU justice and interior ministers will hold an emergency meeting in Brussels on Thursday, the Dutch EU presidency said.

More than 1,000 people gathered around an improvised shrine with candles and street paintings outside the Brussels bourse.

Belgium’s crisis coordination center kept the level of security alert at the maximum as the man hunt continued. Some buses and trains were running but the metro and the airport were closed, along with key road tunnels in Brussels.

The blasts fueled political debate across the globe about how to combat militants.

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination to succeed Obama in November’s U.S. election, suggested suspects could be tortured to avert such attacks. He also said in a British television interview that Muslims were not doing enough to prevent that kind of violence.

After a tip-off from a taxi driver who unwittingly drove the bombers to the airport, police searched an apartment in the Brussels borough of Schaerbeek late into the night, finding another bomb, an Islamic State flag, 15 kg of the same kind of explosives used in the Paris attacks and bomb-making chemicals.

An unused explosive device was also found at the airport.

CLOSING IN

Security experts believed the blasts were probably in preparation before Friday’s arrest of locally based French national Abdeslam, 26, whom prosecutors accuse of a key role in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.

He was caught and has been speaking to investigators after a shootout at an apartment in the south of the city, after which another Islamic State flag and explosives were found.

About 300 Belgians are estimated to have fought with Islamists in Syria, making the country of 11 million the leading European exporter of foreign fighters and a focus of concern in France and other neighbors over its security capabilities.

Reviving arguments over Belgian security policies following the Paris attacks, in which 130 people died in an operation apparently organized from Brussels, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin spoke of “naiveté” on the part of “certain leaders” in holding back from security crackdowns on Muslim communities.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders retorted that each country should look to its own social problems, saying France too had rough high-rise suburbs in which militants had become radicalized. Valls said France had no place teaching Belgium lessons and had problems with its own communities.

Brussels airport seemed likely to remain shut for several days over the busy Easter holiday weekend, since the departure hall was still being combed as a crime scene on Wednesday and repairs can only begin once investigators are finished.

(Editing by Paul Taylor and Ralph Boulton)

Brussels attacks another reminder of Belgian security’s weak link

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The Belgian government warned at the weekend that there might be an attack after the security services captured their most wanted man. It came swiftly.

Tuesday’s explosions, which killed at least 30 people at the main Brussels airport and an underground rail station, came just days after Belgium’s security services caught the last surviving suspect in November’s attacks on Paris.

Belgium has announced $450 million of extra spending to upgrade its security capabilities since it emerged that the country of 11 million people served as the base for the Paris attackers who killed 130 people. But Tuesday’s bombings at home show how much further it still has to go.

Security experts say squabbling layers of government, under-funded spy services, an openness to fundamentalist preachers and a thriving black market in weapons all make Belgium among the most vulnerable countries in Europe to militant attacks.

One U.S. government official told Reuters that Tuesday’s attacks showed Belgian authorities still “have not upped their game”.

Catching Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam on Friday was a coup for Belgium’s security services. But his four months apparently hiding and moving about the capital were also proof of how difficult the task of securing Belgium is likely to be.

It is still too early to say whether Tuesday’s attacks were directly linked to Abdeslam’s capture. U.S. officials believe they may have been already in the works before his arrest, and was not highly sophisticated or the type of attack that required a huge amount of ingenuity.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Charles Michel, who had locked down the capital for days in November after the Paris attacks, warned on Sunday of “a real threat”.

U.S. government sources said that, while the United States and Belgium had believed that another attack after Paris was highly likely, they did not have hard intelligence about where or when such an attack would occur.

Reviving arguments over Belgian policies in the wake of the Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed in an operation apparently organized from Brussels, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin spoke of “naivete” on the part of “certain leaders” in holding back from security crackdowns on Muslim communities.

A lawmaker from Michel’s party, Didier Ducarme, hit back on French television. He said comments like Sapin’s “are starting to seriously irritate me” and noted that it was a France-based gunman who killed four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014.

BENEATH THE RADAR

Catching up after years of neglect was always going to be a problem for Belgium’s intelligence agency, which has just 600 staff, a third as many as in the neighboring Netherlands, a country not much larger and with fewer home-grown jihadists fighting in Syria or Iraq.

Belgium has supplied the highest per capita number of fighters to Syria of any European nation, and the crowded Brussels borough of Molenbeek has been described as a “Jihadist air base” because of the number of militant suspects believed to be living there.

To follow a single suspect around 24 hours a day without being detected, security agencies need crews of as many as 36 officers, U.S. and European officials estimate, meaning even well-staffed agencies such as Britain’s MI5 can only closely follow a limited number of suspects at any particular time.

According to Alain Winants, head of the Belgian intelligence service from 2006 until 2014, Belgium was one of the last places in Europe to obtain modern techniques to gather information, such as telephone taps. On one occasion, police had to deny they let Abdeslam slip due to a law banning house raids at night.

Michel has already said he accepts more is needed. It is impossible for any country to completely secure “soft targets” like busy railway stations and airports. But Belgium also has unique challenges.

The patchwork country divided between French- and Dutch-speakers has a bureaucracy that hinders the sharing of information, with six parliaments for its regions and linguistic communities, 193 local police forces and, in Brussels, 19 autonomous mayors.

That allows militants to hide below the radar in a way they cannot in the much more centralized Netherlands, as well as slowing the passing of new laws to rein in the preaching of hate in mosques and a roaring trade in illegal weapons.

Nearly 6,000 firearms are seized every year in Belgium, more than in all of France, police data shows, often sold by Balkan crime networks to home-grown Belgian jihadists.

VANISHING IN MOLENBEEK

Belgian authorities have been accused of neglecting Muslims and failing to help find jobs to shield them from people seeking to radicalize desperate young men. Youth unemployment can reach up to 40 percent in some parts of wealthy Belgium.

“Because of the difficulty of fitting into a hostile society, they look for alternative networks where they can blend in,” said counter-terrorism expert Rik Coolsaet at the Brussels think-tank Egmont. “Gang activities and the foreign fighters’ undertakings are carried out on the margins of the local environment, where they grew up,” Coolsaet said.

Just a few miles from the power of the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, but effectively a world away, Molenbeek on the poorer side of the city’s industrial-era canal has become a notoriously difficult place to track militants.

Abdeslam was able to vanish into the streets of Molenbeek, some quarters of which are 80 percent Muslim, for four months, protected by family, friends and petty criminals, not far from his parents’ home.

Some problems go back to the 1970s, when Belgium, still heavily industrial at the time, sought favor and cheap oil from Saudi Arabia by providing mosques for Gulf-trained preachers.

European officials acknowledge that no amount of quick funding increases for Belgium’s intelligence services will immediately solve the multitude of challenges.

“We know that it will take a long time,” said General Gratien Maire, deputy head of the French defense staff, said at an event in Brussels on Sunday.

“So we have to be honest and clear with our people.”

(Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels, Mark Hosenball in Washington and Michel Rose in Paris; Editing by Peter Graff and Cynthia Osterman)

Police hunt suspect after Islamic State kills 30 in Brussels suicide attacks

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Islamic State claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train in the Belgian capital on Tuesday which killed at least 30 people, with police hunting a suspect who fled the air terminal.

Police issued a wanted notice for a young man in a hat who was caught on CCTV pushing a laden luggage trolley at Zaventem airport alongside two others who, investigators said, had later blown themselves up in the terminal, killing at least 10 people.

Officials said 20 died on the metro train close to European Union institutions, and Islamic State said that too was a suicide attack.

The coordinated assault triggered security alerts across Europe and drew global expressions of support, four days after Brussels police had captured the prime surviving suspect in Islamic State’s attacks on Paris last November.

Belgian authorities were still checking whether the attacks were linked to the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, according to Federal Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw, although U.S. officials said the level of organization involved suggested they had previously been in preparation.

Last week, explosives and an Islamic flag were found during a raid on a Brussels flat. Police also found a fresh fingerprint of Abdeslam’s there, putting them on to his trail. It was not clear if Abdeslam had been involved at that stage in planning the airport attack.

In a statement, Islamic State said “caliphate soldiers, strapped with suicide vests and carrying explosive devices and machineguns” had targeted the airport and metro station, adding that they had set off their vests amidst the crowds.

A bomb and an Islamic State flag were also found on Tuesday in a flat in Brussels, and Van Leeuw confirmed a manhunt was under way. “A photograph of three male suspects was taken at Zaventem. Two of them seem to have committed suicide attacks. The third, wearing a light-colored jacket and a hat, is actively being sought,” he told a news conference.

A government official said the third suspect had been seen running away from the airport building. Local media reported police had found an undetonated suicide vest in the area.

Belgian police appealed to travelers who had been at the airport and metro station to send in any photographs taken before the attacks in their efforts to identify the bombers.

After questioning Abdeslam, police issued a wanted notice on Monday, identifying 25-year-old Najim Laachraoui as linked to the Paris attacks. The poor quality of Tuesday’s CCTV images and of the Laachraoui wanted poster left open whether he might be the person caught on the airport cameras.

Citizens of the United States, Spain and Sweden were among the injured, their governments reported.

SHOUTS IN ARABIC

A witness said he heard shouts in Arabic and shots shortly before two blasts struck in a packed airport departure lounge at the airport.

Belgian media published the security camera picture of three young men pushing laden luggage trolleys. Police later issued a cropped version of the same photograph, showing only one of the three.

“If you recognize this individual or if you have information on this attack, please contact the investigators,” the notice read. “Discretion assured.”

Police operations were under way at several points in the city but a lockdown imposed immediately after the attacks was eased and commuters and students headed home as public transport partially reopened.

In its statement, Islamic State said: “We promise the crusader alliance against the Islamic State that they will have black days in return for their aggression against the Islamic State.”

Belgium, home to the EU and the headquarters of the NATO military alliance, has sent warplanes to take part in operations against Islamic State in the Middle East.

Austrian Horst Pilger, who was awaiting a flight with his family when the attackers struck, said his children had thought fireworks were going off, but he instantly knew an assault was underway.

“My wife and I both thought ‘bomb’. We looked into each other’s eyes,” he told Reuters. “Five or 10 seconds later there was a major, major, major blast in close vicinity. It was massive.”

Pilger, who works at the European Commission, said the whole ceiling collapsed and smoke flooded the building.

Security services found and destroyed a third bomb at the airport.

“BLACK MOMENT”

U.S. President Barack Obama led calls of support to Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel after Brussels had gone into a state of virtual lock-down.

“We must be together regardless of nationality or race or faith in fighting against the scourge of terrorism,” Obama told a news conference in Cuba. “We can and we will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world.”

Michel spoke at a Brussels news conference of a “black moment” for his country. “What we had feared has come to pass.”

In Paris, where Islamic State killed 130 people in November, the Eiffel Tower was lit up with the colors of the Belgian flag on Tuesday evening in a show of solidarity with Brussels.

Brussels airport will remain closed on Wednesday, its chief executive Arnaud Feist told reporters.

Public broadcaster VRT said police had found a Kalashnikov assault rifle next to the body of an attacker at the airport. Such weapons have become a trademark of Islamic State-inspired attacks in Europe, notably in Belgium and France, including on Nov. 13 in Paris.

Alphonse Youla, 40, who works at the airport, told Reuters he heard a man shouting out in Arabic before the first explosion. “Then the glass ceiling of the airport collapsed.”

“I helped carry out five people dead, their legs destroyed,” he said, his hands covered in blood.

Others said they also heard shooting before the blasts.

A witness said the blasts occurred at a check-in desk.

Video showed devastation in the hall with ceiling tiles and glass scattered across the floor. Bloodied bodies lay around.

Some passengers emerged from the terminal with blood spattered over their clothes. Smoke rose from the building through shattered windows and passengers fled down a slipway, some still hauling their bags.

Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, all wary of spillover from conflict in Syria, were among states announcing extra security measures. Security was tightened at the Dutch border with Belgium.

The blast hit the train as it left Maelbeek station, close to EU institutions, heading to the city center.

VRT carried a photograph of a metro carriage at a platform with doors and windows completely blown out, its structure deformed and interior mangled and charred.

A local journalist tweeted a photograph of a person lying covered in blood among smoke outside the station. Ambulances were ferrying the wounded away and sirens rang out across the area.

“WE ARE AT WAR”

“We are at war and we have been subjected to acts of war in Europe for the last few months,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.

Train services on the cross-channel tunnel from London to Brussels were suspended. Britain advised its citizens to avoid all but essential travel to Brussels.

Security services have been on a high state of alert across western Europe for fear of militant attacks backed by Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attack.

While most European airports are known for stringent screening procedures of passengers and their baggage, that typically takes place only once passengers have checked in and are heading to the departure gates.

Abdeslam, the prime surviving suspect for the Paris attacks on a stadium, cafes and a concert hall, was captured by Belgian police after a shootout on Friday. Interior Minister, Jan Jambon, said on Monday the country was on high alert for a revenge attack.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Heavens in London, Ali Abdelaty and Eric Knecht in Cairo, Barbara Lewis, Robert-Jan Bartunek, Clement Rossignol, Julia Fioretti, Meredith McGrath, Foo Yun Chee, Robin Emmott, Jan Strupczewski, Bate Felix and Alastair Macdonald in Brussels and Jochen Elegeert in Amsterdam; Editing by Ralph Boulton and David Stamp)

Brussels attacks stir debate about global airport security

BERLIN/PARIS (Reuters) – Twin explosions in the departure hall of Brussels Airport prompted several countries worldwide to review or tighten airport security on Tuesday and raised questions about how soon passengers should be screened when entering terminals.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on Brussels airport and a rush-hour metro train which killed at least 30 people.

Prosecutors said the blasts at Zaventem airport, which serves more than 23 million passengers a year, were believed to be caused by suicide bombers.

Authorities responded by stepping up the number of police on patrol at airports in London, Paris and Frankfurt and at other transport hubs as Brussels rail services were also halted. Airlines scrambled to divert flights as Brussels airport announced it would close through Wednesday.

In the United States, the country’s largest cities were placed on high alert and the National Guard was called in to increase security at New York City’s two airports.

The Obama administration was expected to announce new measures to tighten U.S. airport security.

A United Nations agency is already due to review airport security following the downing of a Russian airliner in Egypt by a makeshift soda-can bomb in October last year. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for smuggling the bomb on board.

Other recent incidents have also raised questions about how planes are protected. Last month, a bomber brought a device onto an airliner in Somalia and blew a hole in the fuselage. A year ago, a disturbed pilot deliberately crashed a Germanwings airliner killing 150 people, exploiting anti-terrorist cockpit defenses to lock himself at the controls.

But there has been less attention focused on how airports themselves are secured, before passengers check in for flights, despite a number of attacks.

“It strikes me as strange that only half of the airport is secure. Surely the whole airport should be secure, from the minute you arrive in the car park,” said Matthew Finn, managing director of independent aviation security consultants Augmentiq.

In 2011, a suicide bomber struck the arrival hall at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, killing 37 people. In 2013, a shooter killed a U.S. government Transportation Security Administration officer at Los Angeles international airport. Another gunman killed two there in 2002.

The last major incident at a western European airport was in 2007, when two people tried to drive a jeep packed with propane canisters into the terminal at Glasgow Airport in Scotland. One of the attackers died.

Several airports afterwards stepped up security for cars, but entrances have largely remained open for those on foot.

CHECKPOINTS

European countries reviewed overall security at public locations after November’s attacks by bombers and gunmen in Paris, in which 130 people were killed and hundreds injured, but made no specific changes to airport security.

“Certainly after Paris, there was no significant change to the threat assessment here… We’ll see what happens today,” Robin Hayes, CEO of JetBlue Airways Corp, in an interview on sidelines of an aviation summit in Washington.

The relative openness of public airport areas in Western Europe contrasts with some in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where travelers’ documents and belongings are checked before they are allowed to enter the airport building.

In Turkey, passengers and bags are screened on entering the terminal and again after check-in. Moscow also checks people at terminal entrances.

“Two terrorists who enter the terminal area with explosive devices, this is undoubtedly a colossal failure,” Pini Schiff, the former security chief at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport and currently the CEO of the Israel Security Association, said in an interview with Israel Radio.

Ben Gurion Airport is known for its tough security, including passenger profiling to identify those viewed as suspicious, bomb sniffing devices and questioning of each individual traveler.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where authorities are on high alert for attacks by Somali-based al Shabaab militants, passengers have to get out of their cars, which are then searched, at a checkpoint a kilometer from the main terminal.

In Nairobi and other airports such as the Philippines capital Manila, passengers also have to present their passports and have bags X-rayed to gain entry to terminal buildings.

“I find that checks in front of buildings, such as those at government buildings in the United States, would be 100 percent fine,” said Ralf Leukers, a passenger at Frankfurt airport.

“If you don’t have anything to hide, then you should be happy to have your bags searched.”

But such checks could create upheaval at terminals and rely on security staff paying close attention.

“Any movement of the security ‘comb’ to the public entrance of a terminal building would cause congestion, inconvenience and flight delays, while the inevitable resulting queues would themselves present an attractive target,” said Ben Vogel, Editor, IHS Jane’s Airport Review.

A group representing Europe’s airports said kerbside screening would “be moving the target rather than securing it”.

Augmentiq’s Finn said governments should share more intelligence information and make greater use of modern technology that allows for discreet screening of passengers as they pass through gates or revolving doors.

“This is not unique to Brussels; this is a global phenomenon. We have got to effect the right kind of change, otherwise we will be scratching our heads over why the same questions are being posed and not being answered,” he said.

But adding pre-terminal screening and other measures at airports would be costly.

“I don’t see it happening anytime soon,” said Daniel Wagner, CEO of Country Risk Solutions, a security consulting firm in Connecticut in the United States. “There’s no sense of urgency and not enough money devoted to the problem.”

(Additional reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago, Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, Sarah Young in London, Clara Ferreira Marques in Mumbai, Mark Hosenball and Jeffrey Dastin in Washington and Alwyn Scott in New York; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Peter Graff)