President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday lashed out at European leaders who missed opportunities to prevent terror attacks even though Turkey had previously notified the Belgian authorities and deported one of the Brussels terrorists. “We warn of terrorist threats in order to prevent innocent people from suffering from terrorism due to incapable leaders,” he said.
Belgian authorities face serious questions about possible lapses in security in the wake of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels, as reports surfaced indicating that Turkey had warned Belgium about one of the attackers and two additional suspects are on the U.S. list of terrorists.
The controversy comes as investigators are still piecing together what happened during the attacks which left at least 31 people dead and some 300 injured at the Brussels’s international airport and a central subway station in the Belgian capital. Two of the attackers have been identified as brothers from Brussels, Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, aged 29 and 27. Both are convicted criminals already guilty of parole violations who had not been arrested for the violations, according to a report by the Belga news agency. Belgian federal prosecutors had said on Wednesday that the brothers’ “serious” criminal history was “not linked to terrorism.”
However, on Thursday prosecutors revealed that Belgium had issued an international arrest warrant for Khalid el-Bakraoui on Dec. 11 under the suspicion that he had used a false identity to rent a hideout allegedly used by the terrorists who carried out last year’s Paris attacks.
On Wednesday President Erdoğan said that Turkey previously deported one of the Brussels terrorists and had previously notified the Belgian authorities.
He identified the Brussels attacker who was deported from Turkey in June as Ibrahim el-Bakraoui. “He landed by plane just as any normal Belgian and entered through Schiphol,” he told journalists in Brussels after a meeting with his EU counterparts.
Some of the attackers were on U.S. terrorism list, report says.
The report cited two, unnamed U.S. officials as saying that the Bakraouis were listed as a “potential terror threat” in a U.S. databases.
Poor coordination in a dysfunctional political system divided between French and Flemish speakers along with the inability to infiltrate extremist networks contributed to a string of failures that have caused international alarm. However, some experts have warned that Belgium should not be singled out, pointing to the possibility of similar incidents in other countries in which extremist cells become more and more sophisticated and manage to fly under the radar. Nevertheless, criticism previously rejected by Belguim in November indicating that the Paris attacks were premeditated have now begun to hit home, with two ministers offering their resignation due to “errors” in handling the Brussels attackers.
All three Brussels bombers – airport attackers Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui and metro attacker Khalid el-Bakraoui – were all linked to the prime suspect in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdeslam. Last week, Abdeslam was arrested just around the corner from his family home in the unstable district of Molenbeek after four months on the run. The Bakraoui brothers both had lengthy criminal records, with brother Ibrahim having received a nine-year sentence in 2010 for getting in a gunfight with police during a botched robbery at a Western Union office.