Najim Laachraoui: Brussels bombing suspect 'captured by Belgian police'

Suspect: Najim Laachraoui

A suspected bombmaker accused of plotting the Paris carnage was reportedly captured today after being named with two brothers as the terrorists who attacked Brussels airport.

Special forces arrested Najim Laachraoui, 24, in the Anderlecht area this morning after a tip-off, according to local reports.

He had been named as the third man in a CCTV picture showing three men minutes before the suicide blasts which ripped through the airport’s departure hall early yesterday, killing 14 people.

The two others are brothers Khalid, 27, and Ibrahim El Bakraoui, also in his 20s, who blew themselves up in the busy terminal.

Laachraoui, whose DNA was allegedly found on suicide belts used in the Bataclan Theatre and the Stade de France in Paris, is believed to have failed to set off his bomb at Brussels airport.

There were also unconfirmed reports that his brother was the suicide bomber who targeted a metro station near the EU headquarters in the city centre.

Laachraoui and the El Bakraoui brothers were “well known criminals” and are understood to have been on the run for almost ten days following a shoot-out at a terrorist hideout in the Belgian capital.

Despite the manhunt, they are believed to have hidden at another address just a couple of miles away where they stored the explosives and guns used in Tuesday’s attacks.

The El Bakraoui brothers were known to have been heavily involved in Brussels’ flourishing arms trade and are suspected to have supplied weapons to the Paris attackers.

Ibrahim was convicted of firing a Kalashnikov at police in 2010, during an armed raid, but was released from prison after a short sentence.

The revelations left Belgium’s security services and political leaders facing growing questions over why more was not done to capture the men before the atrocity.

The main suspects in the Brussels airport attacks are said to be brothers who were known to police

Amid the mourning and anger at the terrorist outrage, which left 34 people dead and 230 seriously wounded in co-ordinated attacks at the airport and the Maalbeek metro station, details started to emerge about how the killers were identified.

A taxi driver who drove the El Bakraouis and Laachraoui to the airport was under armed guard as he provided vital evidence.

Police received a call from the driver, who has not been identified, yesterday evening after CCTV footage of the prime suspects was released.

He immediately realised that all had got into his car earlier in the day, and complained that the vehicle was “not big enough” for all their luggage.

The men expressed anger, and had to leave a case behind in the house where they were picked up in the Schaerbeek district of Brussels.

Belgium’s VTM TV channel reported that the men would not allow the taxi driver to load the suitcases himself, and that within an hour all were at Zaventem-Brussels airport.

The three were pictured on airport security cameras as they wheeled trolleys through the departures building, but one is known to have escaped after his explosives failed to detonate.

The brothers each wore a single glove, on their left hand, which is believed to have been to conceal the trigger for their suicide bombs, packed with nails and bolts, in their suitcases.

When the taxi driver recognised all three, he tipped off police, and they raided the Schaerbeek property, finding a nail bomb, chemicals, and an Islamic State flag.

Brussels terror attacks

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Khalid El Bakraoui had used a false name to rent a property in Forest, as well as another in nearby Charleroi, which was also used by the Paris terrorists.

“These suspects were well known to police – everything was being done to try and find them, and the hunt for Laachraoui continues,’ said a Belgian prosecuting source.

The attacks, for which Isis claimed responsibility, came four days after the arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, the 26-year-old who provided vital logistics for the Paris attacks.

Absedlam had stayed in the flat in Forest, in which Mohamed Belkaid, another Isis terrorist, was shot dead during the police aid.

It is now thought that it was the El-Bakraoui brothers who fled the flat under a hail of bullets.

The failure to capture the brothers left growing doubts over the ability of the security services to protect the country.

British counter-terrorism expert, Professor Peter Neumann from London’s King’s College, warned that terror threat in Belgium was partly the result of the authorities there having “abandoned” parts of Brussels, possibly over several decades.

He said the country’s intelligence agencies were also not capable of coping with the scale of the threat in a country which has seen a higher proportion of its citizens travelling to fight in Syria than any other European nation.

“They were not built for the number of people,” he said, referring to Belgium’s intellingence agencies. “They have never been in their history confronted with that large a number of potentially violent extremists.

“But at the same time it’s also true that parts of Brussels have effectively been abandoned by the state, including the security agencies, not for years, but maybe for decades.”

Belgium has the highest number of jihadists per capita, 500, who have gone to fight in Syria or Iraq, 500.

Guy Trouveroy, Belgium’s ambassador to UK, admitted that security forces in his country had had to step up their game to meet the “challenge” posed by Islamist terrorists.

“We went maybe pace by pace, haphazardly in the beginning. It’s not easy. These are professinals and they know how to put up a commando operation,” he told BBC radio.

Meanwhile, a judicial hearing in Brussels for Paris attacks suspect Abdeslam has been postponed until Thursday, apparently because of heightened security concerns in the Belgian capital.

Abdeslam, who was arrested in Brussels on Friday, was due to appear before a panel of judges who could extend his detention by another month.

French authorities are seeking his extradition so that he can be tried for his alleged role in the November attacks.

An assistant to Abdeslam's defence lawyer Sven Mary said her boss was told the hearing had been rescheduled for Thursday morning.

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