Ibrahim el-Bakraoui (rt) was sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison for shooting at police officers after a robbery attempt at a currency exchange office. It was not clear when or why he was released, or how he ended up in Turkey.
In 2011, Khalid el-Bakraoui (lt) was sentenced to five years in prison for attempted carjacking; when arrested, he was in possession of assault rifles. Interpol issued a warrant for him in August after he violated his parole.
Sent back to bomb Brussels: Outrage as Turkish president reveals they arrested ISIS fanatic in June and deported him BACK to Belgium - and even warned authorities he was a militant
- Turkish president reveals Ibrahim El Bakraoui [photo on rt] was detained in Gaziantep in southern Turkey near the Syrian border
One of the Brussels bombers was arrested in Turkey and deported back to Belgium in June with a warning that he was a militant, it has sensationally been revealed.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who blew himself up at Brussels Airport on Tuesday, was arrested in Gaziantep in southern Turkey close to the Syrian border last summer. Officials said he was deported to Holland before being passed back over to Belgium.
The president said Belgian authorities had failed to confirm the suspect's links to terrorism 'despite our warnings that he was a foreign fighter'.
The revelation came as it was dramatically revealed last night that the identity of the 'Man in White', who was previously thought to be explosives expert Najim Laachraoui, remains a mystery. He is now Europe's most wanted man and a major international manhunt to find him remains ongoing.
It emerged as it was revealed that Laachraoui was actually the other airport suicide bomber, who was pictured on the left-hand side on CCTV footage showing the three ISIS suspects wheeling their suitcases into the terminal prior to the deadly bombing which occurred at 8am local time on Tuesday.
Ibrahim and Laachraoui killed 14 people and injured dozens of others when they set off suicide vests and explosives-packed suitcases at the airport. They were accompanied by the 'Man in White' who abandoned his suicide mission and fled the terminal when his nail-shrouded bomb failed to explode.
Just 79 minutes later, Ibrahim's brother - Khalid El Bakraoui - detonated his suicide vest on a Brussels Metro train at Maelbeek station killing 20 people.
Earlier yesterday, it emerged that Ibrahim left a suicide note telling how he was desperate to blow himself up because he did not want to go to prison like his friend, the Paris logistics chief Salah Abdeslam.
The typed note, found next to 15kg of homemade explosives, an AK-47 and an ISIS flag during a raid at a property in the Schaerbeek area of the city, said: 'I don't know what to do. I'm in a hurry. I'm on the run. People are looking for me everywhere. And if I give myself up then I'll end up in a cell.'
The latest twist came after it was revealed the Belgian El Bakraoui brothers escaped police in a gunfight during an anti-terror raid just eight days ago. The raid carried out last Tuesday on a flat in the suburb of Forest saw a sniper kill terror suspect Mohamed Belkaid while the El Bakraoui brothers managed to escape police.
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- Brussels airport bomber Laachraoui was explosives expert who also made suicide vests for the Paris massacres
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| There were scenes of devastation at the main terminal at Brussels national airport yesterday as rescue workers and officials continued to pick through the rubble Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3505610/Brussels-airport-suicide-bombers-Belgian-brothers-accomplice-white-remains-run.html#ixzz43nkoVh00 Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook |
NY TIMES
If another example of the failure of European intelligence services to share and act on information about potential terrorists was needed, Wednesday’s identification of the bombers in the deadly Brussels attacks the day before certainly provides it.
At least one of the attackers, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, had been deported by Turkey to the Netherlands last year with a clear indication that he was a jihadist.
“Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told a news conference in Ankara on Wednesday, “the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism.”
By now it is abundantly clear that the terrorists who work for the Islamic State think, cooperate and operate across borders, ignoring national boundaries. The increasingly urgent question for Europe in its struggle against them is, Can it do the same?
The outlook is not promising. On Wednesday there were renewed calls for a pan-European intelligence agency that would effectively share information from different countries. Members of the European Parliament took to the airwaves and print to denounce, again, the lack of coordination.
Yet the hurdles are as basic as national pride and bureaucratic turf protection, with experts pointing out that even within nations, intelligence-gathering agencies — France alone has some 33 of them — have trouble cooperating.
Cross-border cooperation would probably have helped prevent Tuesday’s attacks. Mr. Erdogan said Wednesday that both the Netherlands and the Belgian authorities had been informed of Mr. Bakraoui’s deportation, since he was a Belgian citizen.
it is certain that the absence of inter-European help was deeply harmful not only in Brussels but also in staving off the massacres in Paris in November.
The Paris plotters slipped easily in and out of Europe, then hatched their plans in one country, Belgium, before carrying them out in another, France. Then one slipped across the border again, taking advantage of the openness that is foundational to the European Union.
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| In mourning: Airport workers and their relatives lit candles outside Brussels main airport yesterday in honour of those who were killed Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3505610/Brussels-airport-suicide-bombers-Belgian-brothers-accomplice-white-remains-run.html#ixzz43nQP06WN Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook |
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Resolving the problem, political analysts say, does not require simply more intelligence cooperation and shared lists of people suspected of being radicals and fighters returning from Syria. European governments must also develop internal strategies to deal with the threat at home — the deep social problems of racism and radicalism, along with the security dilemma, which raises concerns about surveillance, justice and civil liberties.
“You can bomb Raqqa, and you may consider that to be war, but you’re not going to bomb Molenbeek or Schaerbeek or St.-Denis....Important pockets of the disenfranchised and isolated are embedded in most European countries, he said: Bradford in England, heavily Kashmiri and home to the London subway bombers of July 7, 2005; largely Muslim East Birmingham, where organized crime and radicalism spring from the same roots; and the heavily immigrant suburbs or banlieues of France’s big cities.
Belgium, already divided by language and with a plethora of local and state federalisms and police forces, provides a special example.
“There are parts of Europe, especially in France and Belgium, where over the past two decades you’ve seen the emergence of essentially ungoverned spaces, nearly akin to Yemen or Libya,” said Peter R. Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College London. “Molenbeek is one of them, a place where local authorities and even mainstream Muslim groups abandoned them, with an informal pact, that ‘as long as we don’t see you, we won’t bother you.’ ”
These were “no-go areas for the authorities, who have found it very difficult to get informants and human intelligence,”
- Driver who took terrorists to airport reveals that fourth suitcase bomb was left behind because it wouldn't fit in taxi
- Cabbie was suspicious after attacks and led police to safehouse containing fourth bomb, ISIS flag and suicide note
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He saw something and he said something.
The cab driver who took three mass murderers to the Brussels airport on Tuesday thought the way they handled their baggage was weird. There were too many suitcases—very heavy suitcases. They said they’d ordered a van, but all he had was a sedan. According to some accounts, one suitcase had to be left behind. And they didn’t seem to want him to touch those bags.
Drivers get used to strange passengers, but when this one heard news that bombs had gone off at the airport, he went straight to the Belgian police and led them to the apartment where he’d picked up those three men with their heavy bags in the Schaarbeek neighborhood of Brussels.
The police search turned up a trove of bomb-making materials: 15 kilos of powerful TATP explosives made from raw materials common in beauty supply stores—acetone (nail polish remover) and hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach)—but in much greater quantities than the average vanity unit. There were 150 liters of acetone and 30 liters of peroxide: truly a bomb-making factory.
They also found a laptop thrown into a trashcan, and on it, according to prosecutors, was “the last will” of Ibrahim el Bakraoui, well known to police as a criminal and a thug, but not a jihadist. He said he was acting “in haste,” that he “no longer knew what to do,” that he was “hunted everywhere” and could “no longer be safe.”
Those snippets of his testament, released by the Belgian Federal Prosecutor on Wednesday afternoon, seemed to confirm the theory that a terrorist plot that had been taking shape for some time was suddenly rushed when Belgian and French police started closing in on Salah Abdeslam, a member of the terrorist cell that attacked Paris in November, killing 130 people.
“If they take too long, they risk winding up next to him in a cell,” wrote el Bakraoui. The prosecutors offered no more context than that.
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That cab driver, and people like him, may hold the key. For obvious reasons, his name has not been leaked to the press, but according to sources in a position to know, he is, as many of the terrorists were, of Moroccan descent. But he volunteered information that has been critical to the ongoing investigation, and has helped it move along much more quickly than it might otherwise have done.
The challenge for European politicians and police, and indeed for Americans as well, is to encourage more people from Muslim and Arab communities to come forward when they see the first signs of suspicious activities.
When all Arabs and Muslims are vilified, isolated, pressured, intimidated and humiliated—the formula being preached in not-so-coded language by fear-mongering populists in Europe and the United States—they’re not going to be inclined to help investigators solve the crimes we have seen, or stop those that are to come.
“What we need to do is to understand what just happened and look ahead,” says Pieter Stockmans, who coauthored The Jihad Caravan, a book about Belgium and jihadism.
Looking ahead is what ISIS has been doing all along. The Brussels attacks are just a small step in the collective ISIS effort to force the hand of the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims, eliminate the so-called “gray zone” and force them to take the side of violent jihad.
[As French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, which carried out the Paris attacks and which presumably was involved in today’s bombings, is following a playbook written more than a decade ago: The Call for an International Islamic Resistance by Abu Musab al Suri, a Syrian jihadi.]
The “caliph” of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, spelled out the strategy on May 15 last year, “If the Crusaders today have begun to bother the Muslims who continue to live in the lands of the cross by monitoring them, arresting them, and questioning them, then soon they will begin to displace them and take them away either dead, imprisoned, or homeless.”
In short, tearing up Western society by causing different groups to turn on each other is exactly what ISIS is aiming for. “Further estrangement from one another [Muslims from non-Muslims] is the perfect base for recruitment of terrorists,” says Stockmans.