Belgium claims no warning on bomber

Belgium says it had no advance knowledge of the deportation from Turkey last summer of Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the suicide bombers who struck Brussels this week, as the Netherlands said it had no reason to take action when the man landed there in July.

“We weren’t warned until after the plane landed at Schiphol Airport,” Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens told reporters in Brussels.

“The only thing we knew before that, by the end of June, was that he had been arrested. He was expelled without further notice and without telling us he was going to be expelled.”

Investigators in Belgium identified El Bakraoui as one of the bombers in the terrorist attacks on Tuesday that left more than 30 people dead in Brussels. El Bakraoui was deported from Turkey on July 14, 2015, to the Netherlands on suspicions he was planning to cross the Syrian border. Geens and Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon offered to resign over the issue but the prime minister rejected the offers.

Brussels police detained six people yesterday in raids in several areas of the capital related to the probe of Tuesday’s attacks, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The searches were carried out in central Brussels and in the neighbourhoods of Schaerbeek and Jette.

Geens was attending a meeting of EU interior ministers, who vowed to accelerate counter-terrorism measures in the wake of the deadly attacks. Geens said he gathered “very important information” on the investigation into the assaults from at least three other EU governments.

Dutch Justice Minister Ad van der Steur presented documents to the Dutch parliament in The Hague showing that the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent a message to the Dutch embassy in Ankara 26 minutes before El Bakraoui’s scheduled takeoff, saying El Bakraoui would be on the flight to Schiphol. The note sent to the Dutch embassy didn’t say why El Bakraoui was being expelled.

“The note did not contain any information or clarification about the background or about the reason Turkey facilitated the flight”, Van der Steur said in a letter to parliament, adding that the Netherlands didn’t receive a request to take any action on El Bakraoui.

“No suspicions were known about him”, when El Bakraoui landed in the Netherlands, Van der Steur said in the letter, which was posted on the parliament’s website late on Thursday. “It was not a return from detention nor an escorted return,” and El Bakraoui had a valid Belgian passport, he said.

The Dutch parliament had scheduled a debate on the Brussels attacks and the El Bakraoui issue for Thursday evening, but that was postponed to next week.

Shaken by the Brussels terrorist attacks, EU governments pledged to step up surveillance and plug holes in criminal databases that have allowed jihadist plotters to operate undetected.

Europe faces greater hurdles than the US after the 9/11 attacks in hunting terrorists-in-the-making because EU intelligence gathering is splintered among 28 countries

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