BRUSSELS – Belgium’s justice minister acknowledged Thursday that the authorities had erred by not acting on Turkey’s request last year that they take custody of a Belgian citizen arrested for suspected terrorist activity.
The man was one of the Islamic State suicide bombers in the devastating Brussels attacks. The acknowledgments by the justice minister, Koen Geens, and interior minister, Jan Jambon, were the first high-level Belgian admissions of blunder in the aftermath of the bombings on Tuesday.
The attacks have exposed missteps by European security officials and police, just four months after the Islamic State’s assault on targets in Paris. Jambon told the newspaper Le Soir that there had been “two types of mistakes, at the level of the Justice Ministry and at the level of the liaison officer in Turkey, which involves the Interior and Justice ministries.”
Both ministers offered their resignations on Thursday, an implicit acknowledgment of responsibility for perhaps having failed to avert the bombings at the Brussels airport and a downtown subway station that left 31 people dead and 300 wounded. With Belgium at its maximum state of terrorist alert and numerous police raids underway, Prime Minister Charles Michel rejected the resignation offers.
The most glaring lapse, which Turkey’s president first raised publicly on Wednesday, appeared to be Belgian officials’ inaction on a Turkish request last June that Belgium take custody of Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who had been arrested in Turkey as a suspected terrorist for trying to enter Syria.
This week, El Bakraoui was one of two brothers identified as being among the three suicide bombers in Brussels.
When Belgium did not act on the notification, Turkish officials said, they deported El Bakraoui to the Netherlands at his request. Geens at first reacted to Turkey’s assertion by justifying Belgium’s inaction, saying on Wednesday that the suspect was a common criminal not known for terrorism. But on Thursday he was more self-critical.
“There probably has not been a timely flow of information from Turkey to Belgium and from information inside Belgium,” the minister said.
The connections between the deadly attacks in Belgium and Paris are pointing investigators and terrorism experts toward the conclusion that there is a sprawling network of trained attackers that leads back to Syria but is rooted in Europe as well.
“Definitely there are other attacks to be feared and other individuals will emerge — we are in a long-term dynamic here,” Didier Leroy, a researcher on jihadi networks said.
