Brussels attacks: Security laxes exposed nation to extremists

The Belgian government warned at the weekend that there might be an attack after the security services captured their most wanted man. It came swiftly.

Tuesday’s explosions, which killed at least 30 people at the main Brussels airport and an underground rail station, came just days after Belgium’s security services caught the last surviving suspect in November’s attacks on Paris.

Belgium has announced €400m of extra spending to upgrade its security capabilities since it emerged that the country of 11 million people served as the base for the Paris attackers who killed 130 people. However, Tuesday’s bombings at home show how much further it still has to go.

Security experts say squabbling layers of government, under-funded spy services, an openness to fundamentalist preachers and a thriving black market in weapons all make Belgium among the most vulnerable countries in Europe to militant attacks.

One US government official claimed Tuesday’s attacks showed Belgian authorities still “have not upped their game”.

Catching Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam on Friday was a coup for Belgium’s security services. However, his four months apparently hiding and moving about the capital were also proof of how difficult the task of securing Belgium is likely to be. It is still too early to say if Tuesday’s attacks were directly linked to Abdeslam’s capture.

US officials believe they may have been already in the works before his arrest, and was not highly sophisticated or the type of attack that required a huge amount of ingenuity.

Nevertheless, Belgium prime minister Charles Michel, who had locked down the capital for days in November after the Paris attacks, warned on Sunday of “a real threat”.

Graphic shows timeline of terrorist attacks from Paris to Brussels.

While Belgium had believed that another attack after Paris was highly likely, they did not have hard intelligence about where or when such an attack would occur.

Reviving arguments over Belgian policies in the wake of the Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed in an operation apparently organised from Brussels, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin spoke of “naivete” on the part of “certain leaders” in holding back from security crackdowns on Muslim communities.

A politician from Michel’s party, Didier Ducarme, hit back on French television. He said comments like Sapin’s “are starting to seriously irritate me” and said that it was a France-based gunman who killed four at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014.

Catching up after years of neglect was always going to be a problem for Belgium’s intelligence agency, which has just 600 staff, a third as many as in the neighbouring Netherlands, a country not much larger and with fewer home-grown jihadists fighting in Syria or Iraq.

Belgium has supplied the highest per capita number of fighters to Syria of any European nation, and the crowded Brussels borough of Molenbeek has been described as a “Jihadist air base” because of the number of militant suspects believed to be living there.

To follow a single suspect around 24 hours a day without being detected, security agencies need crews of up to 36 officers, US and European officials estimate, meaning even well-staffed agencies such as Britain’s MI5 can only closely follow a limited number of suspects at any particular time.

According to Alain Winants, head of the Belgian intelligence service from 2006 until 2014, Belgium was one of the last places in Europe to obtain modern techniques to gather information, such as telephone taps.

On one occasion, police had to deny they let Abdeslam slip due to a law banning house raids at night.

Michel has already said he accepts more is needed. The patchwork country divided between French- and Dutch-speakers has a bureaucracy that hinders the sharing of information, with six parliaments for its regions and linguistic communities, 193 local police forces and, in Brussels, 19 autonomous mayors.

That allows militants to hide below the radar in a way they cannot in the much more centralised Netherlands, as well as slowing the passing of new laws to rein in the preaching of hate in mosques and a roaring trade in illegal weapons.

Nearly 6,000 guns are seized every year in Belgium, more than in all of France, police data shows, often sold by Balkan crime networks to home-grown Belgian jihadists.

Belgian authorities have been accused of neglecting Muslims and failing to help find jobs to shield them from people seeking to radicalise desperate young men. Youth unemployment can reach up to 40% in some parts of wealthy Belgium.