One of the two men who blew themselves up at Brussels Airport on Tuesday was a bomb maker who helped produce two suicide vests used in the attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris on November 13, the Belgian authorities said on Friday.
The bomb maker - Najim Laachraoui, 24, a Belgian citizen who went to Syria in February 2013 - was described as an accomplice of Salah Abdeslam, 26, who was captured in Belgium last Friday after a four-month global manhunt and charged with terrorist murder. Abdeslam is suspected of being the sole surviving direct participant in the Paris attacks, and his arrest appears to have accelerated the plot that culminated in the attack on Brussels.
On December 10, in an apartment on Rue Henri Berge in Schaerbeek, investigators found bomb-making equipment, a fingerprint from Abdeslam and Laachraoui's DNA. And on Monday - three days after Abdeslam was captured in Molenbeek, the Brussels neighbourhood where he grew up - the authorities asked for help finding Laachraoui.
It was too late. At 7:58 am on Tuesday, he blew himself up at Brussels Airport, along with another suicide bomber, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29. News agencies had widely reported Mr. Laachraoui's death, but officials awaited DNA results before confirming the news. On Friday, it became clear that Mr. Laachraoui was a crucial link between the Paris and Brussels attacks.
The Belgian authorities also announced that three men had been arrested in Brussels on Friday, as the inquiry into the bombings that devastated the Belgian capital widened to encompass investigations in France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
On Thursday night, the French authorities arrested Reda Kriket, an Islamic State operative who, according to court records, raised money for jihad and travelled to Syria in late 2014. Kriket was well known to the security services in both France and Belgium, and he was named in a 2015 court proceeding along with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was the on-the-ground chief planner of the Paris attacks.
According to a French court transcript, "Reda Kriket appears to have played an important role in financing and providing material support to the group." It said he had raised the funds through fraud and petty theft. In July, Kriket was convicted in France in absentia of terrorist activities and possession of stolen goods.
The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that Kriket, described as being part of a circle of militants that included Abaaoud, had been involved in the "advanced stages" of a new terrorist plot.
The three men who were arrested in Belgium on Friday were all being questioned about possible connections to Kriket.
Also on Thursday night, the police in Düsseldorf arrested a 28-year-old German long known to the authorities for having ties to Islamist extremists in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state. They were acting to prevent him from fleeing to Syria, a spokesman for the state prosecutor said. Turkey deported the German man and one of the Brussels suicide bombers - Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, who blew himself up in the subway - to the Netherlands last year, German news media and security officials said.
"It is not clear whether they knew each other, and, if so, how well," said Ralf Herrenbrück, a spokesman for the state prosecutor's office in Düsseldorf. The German man was sentenced to two and a half years in prison earlier this month for a robbery, but had not yet started his sentence, the Germans said.
German news media reported on Friday that the federal police had arrested a 28-year-old Moroccan during a routine identity check at a train station in Giessen, in the west of the country, on Wednesday. The suspect has a criminal record in Germany and Italy, the reports said, and had papers on him indicating that he had been hospitalised for an unexplained injury on March 18, the same day that Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels.
Further investigation led the authorities to suspect that the man might have links to the attackers in Brussels, including a text message on his phone with the word "fin," French for "end," received on Tuesday, shortly before the attacks in Brussels, the public broadcaster ARD reported. A further message contained the name Khalid el-Bakraoui, according to the newsweekly Der Spiegel.
Criminal investigators for the state of Hesse, where Giessen is, were unable to confirm the reports on Friday, because the case had been transferred to state prosecutors, who were not immediately available for comment because of the Good Friday holiday.
Also, Spanish and Dutch news agencies reported that European intelligence authorities were searching for Naïm al-Hamed, a 28-year-old Syrian, as part of the investigations into the Brussels attacks. Hamed was said to be linked to Laachraoui, Khalid el-Bakraoui and a third suspect, Mohamed Abrini.
The Belgian government has come under heavy criticism for failures in intelligence, law enforcement and information sharing that have allowed Brussels to become a hub of terrorist planning in Europe.
At 2 pm on Friday, Interior Minister Jan Jambon and Justice Minister Koen Geens faced a parliamentary committee, whose members were expected to ask tough questions about the lapses.
Officials have acknowledged that they should have acted on an alert last year from Turkey about Ibrahim el-Bakraoui. He was detained in Turkey near the border with Syria on suspicion of terrorist activity, but the Belgian authorities never followed up. Bakraoui was deported to the Netherlands at his request.
In addition, the Belgian federal prosecutor's office said that Khalid el-Bakraoui had been sought in connection with the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris on November 13.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
