Insufficient resources, missed signals, failure to pass on information, complacency…
The terrorist attacks on the Brussels airport and subway system and their aftermath have exposed Belgium’s long-standing shortcomings and various missteps in dealing with its homegrown terrorist threat.
Here are 12 of the worst Belgium lapses:
1. Belgium didn’t act on warnings from Turkey
In June 2015, Turkey notified Belgian authorities that it had stopped Brahim el-Bakraoui, one of the brothers who blew himself up during Tuesday’s attacks, at the Syrian border. Suspected by Turkey of being a “foreign terrorist fighter,” el-Bakraoui was deported on July 14, 2015 to the Netherlands.
Belgium didn’t act on the information, which was surprising given that El-Bakraoui likely breached the parole terms of a Belgian prison sentence he was serving by leaving for Turkey. Law enforcement neither questioned, detained nor monitored him and don’t even know precisely when he returned home.
Interior Minister Jan Jambon told Parliament on Friday that authorities in Belgium didn’t act on the information from the Turkish government because the responsible Turkey-based diplomat told them about it six days after el-Bakraoui had been deported.
Jambon acknowledged that “someone has been negligent,” but declined to classify the incident as an overall system failure.
Belgium Interior Minister Jan Jambon arrives at the European Commission to take part in a ceremony in memory of the victims of Brussels’ terror attacks | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Brahim Abdeslam, one of the Paris attackers and brother of Salah, had also been detained in Turkey because authorities believed he was trying to reach Syria. Abdeslam was interrogated on his return to Belgium but was not monitored or detained by Belgium authorities. After the attacks, the family of Brahim Abdeslam said he spent “a long time” in Syria, according to media reports.
“We didn’t have proof that he took part in the activities of a terrorist group,” said Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office.
2. Too few resources to track foreign fighters
Belgium authorities knew that large numbers of their citizens were traveling to Syria to join ISIL, in per capita the highest number of any EU country, but didn’t adequately monitor them upon their return.
Jambon acknowledged in late February that at least 117 Belgians who left to train in Syria are now back in the country. Other estimates put the figure at twice that.
Before the Paris attacks, the Belgian civil security service, Surete de L’Etat, “had only 600 personnel to keep tabs on 900 ‘persons of interest’, many of them potential jihadis who have travelled to Syria and Iraq,” Patrick Bury, a former NATO researcher, wrote in the Irish Times.
Given that some of these 117 returnees would need 24-hour surveillance, which can require between 10 and 20 agents to follow a single “person of interest” according to experts, the services are severely understaffed.
At a POLITICO event in November, Jambon said online monitoring of radical activity was “a weak point in Belgium. We are now enlarging the capacity.” Following the Paris attacks, the Belgian government acknowledged it needed to improve its handling of Islamist radicalism and terrorism, and announced a €400 million investment in prevention measures.
3. House searches banned between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Police couldn’t search a house in Molenbeek after 9 p.m. and before 5 in the morning two days after Salah Abdeslam crossed back into Belgium following the Paris attacks. The country’s law prohibits raids between those hours. Justice Minister Koen Geens said Abdeslam was “likely” hiding in the dwelling, though Belgium’s federal prosecutors later denied that claim.
By the time the Brussels attacks took place, around 120 houses in Molenbeek had been searched, according to the prime minister’s spokesperson, Barend Leyts. That is less than one in every 250 of the 38,000 homes in Molenbeek.
Abdeslam was caught some 500 meters from the house where authorities believe he helped plan the Paris attacks.
4. Information, data not shared
A local Belgian police chief failed to pass on a tip for three months that could have led to investigators to Salah Abdeslam. The information was not entered in the national terrorism database.
“Unfortunately, a mistake has been made within my team,” said Yves Bogaerts, police chief for Mechelen, just north of Brussels. “A colleague … forgot to pass on the information of the dossier.”
As well as difficulties managing pseudonyms, Belgium also lacks data on illegal weapons.
Belgian media reported that Mechelen police had information in December 2015 about a relative of Abdeslam’s who it was feared had become radicalized. That relative was identified as Abid Aberkan, who lives at the address in Rue des Quatre-Vents, Molenbeek, where Abdeslam was arrested March 18.
The task of establishing the full facts around the failure to pass on this tip is now in the hands of an independent police watchdog appointed by the Belgian federal Parliament, known as ‘Committee P.’
A separate Committee P report due for publication in coming weeks, according to a draft seen by broadcaster RTBF, says other “glaring” errors exist in information coordination. RTBF quotes the report as saying “before the Paris attacks, a nom de guerre used by one of the terrorists featured in several (police) databases in Belgium, but not in the central database.”
As well as difficulties in managing pseudonyms, Belgium also lacks data on illegal weapons. In Belgium, there’s a problem with data management,” Nils Duquet, a researcher at the Flemish Peace Institute, told France 24. “Nobody knows how many illegal weapons there are in Belgium, the reality is we have no idea.” said Duquet.
5. Abdeslam not interrogated on imminent threats
Following Abdeslam’s capture on March 18, investigators questioned him for one hour and mostly on the Paris attacks.
Despite the discovery of detonators, weapons, and Abdeslam’s fingerprints in a safe house days earlier and growing evidence that the Brussels terror network was stronger than previously thought, law enforcement officials only briefly interrogated Abdeslam because he was still recovering from surgery after being shot in the leg during his apprehension, according to a senior Belgian security official, who asked for anonymity to speak about the investigation.
Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam | EPA via Belgian Federal Police
“He seemed very tired and he had been operated on the day before,” the security official told POLITICO.
The questioning session yielded no information about any imminent threats.
Three days later, the suspected terrorists struck the airport and metro train.
6. Metro continued to run, despite apparent order to shut down
More than an hour after the airport suicide bombings, the Brussels metro system kept running. At 9:11 a.m., the height of the morning rush hour, Khalid el-Bakraoui, along with a possible accomplice, blew himself up on a train at Maalbeek subway station near the European Commission headquarters, killing at least 20.
Jambon told the Belgian parliament Friday that authorities decided at 8:50 a.m. to close the train system.
STIB-MIVB, which runs the metro, said it never received the order, either at 8:50 a.m. or at 9.04 a.m. when Belgium switched the terror alert threat to its highest level.
“There is no recorded message, no phone call,” according to STIB.
7. Got the wrong ‘missing bomber’
A Belgian man identified as Fayçal C was arrested Thursday and later charged with participation in a terrorist group, terrorist killings and attempted terrorist killings.
On Monday they released him.
“The clues that had led to the arrest of Fayçal C were not backed by the evolution of the current investigation,” the federal prosecutor’s office said in a press statement.
The man, who was named by local media as Fayçal Cheffou, made a documentary in 2014 about the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners in a Belgian jail close to Zaventem.
The suspect in the hat remains unaccounted for | Belgian Federal Police via Getty Images
There was widespread media speculation that Cheffou was the mystery “man in the hat,” captured on CCTV together with bombers Brahim el-Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui in Zaventem airport shortly before the attack. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that prosecutors were unable to match Cheffou’s DNA with genetic material gathered at the scene.
The “man in the hat” remains unaccounted for.
8. Confusion over suspects’ previous links to terrorism
In the immediate aftermath of the Brussels attacks, prosecutors said brothers Khalid and Brahim el-Bakraoui were known to police but did not have known links to terrorism.
The following day the federal prosecutors’ office issued a statement directly contradicting the earlier assertion, saying international and European arrest warrants had in fact been issued for metro bomber Khalid el-Bakraoui on December 11 by the judge in charge of Belgium’s investigations into the Paris attacks. Khalid was suspected of renting a room in Charleroi that was used as a hideout by the Paris attackers.
Belgian prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw had also downplayed any connection between the Paris and Brussels attacks at first, saying last Tuesday that “it is too early to establish a link.”
As well as identifying Khalid as a suspect in the Paris plot months ago, investigators in Paris had also found DNA from Najim Laachraoui on suicide vests that were used in the Paris attacks. He was later identified as one of the two bombers at Brussels airport.
9. Limited CCTV in Brussels
Limited coverage of Brussels by CCTV cameras made it harder to find Abdeslam in the European Union’s capital than it would have been in London or Paris, according to a Western intelligence source.
“The fact that Salah Abdeslam was in Belgium was clear to everyone, but unfortunately only the Belgians were the ones who could catch him,” said another senior European security official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
10. Border bungle
On the morning after the Paris attacks, French police stopped a car with Salah Abdeslam near the Belgian border and checked his documents. His name didn’t come up in their database.
Belgian authorities had passed his details to the French just 15 minutes later, Jambon later told Belgian broadcaster VTM.
A man wears the Belgian flag as people observe a one minute silence at the Place De La Bourse | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Belgium’s border services were rebuked last month by other European governments for running a “deficient” border regime. The security agencies of EU countries demanded Belgium fix its “wide open” borders, which included failure to conduct searches of people and luggage on flights to and from Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey at Brussels South Charleroi Airport.
The shortcomings in sharing information between European countries has been a problem for years. Jambon told POLITICO in November that at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, only four EU countries were exchanging information about terrorism suspects. Although he said things were improving, effective policing across borders was still “a very difficult point,” he said.
11. Lack of police accountability and funding
Following the bungled law enforcement investigation of child serial killer and rapist Marc Dutroux in the 1990s, significant judicial and police reforms were implemented in a country traumatized by that case.
Instead of 19 police forces for the 19 communes of Brussels, six local police forces took their place in the capital, which still leaves law enforcement Balkanized in the capital. “In New York there is just one” police force, an exasperated Jambon said days before the Paris attacks.
The police in Molenbeek is the most poorly funded in Brussels, according to the most current policing budgets for Brussels-West. Less is spent per inhabitant and per police officer in Brussels-West than on the other five police forces in Brussels.
The minister-president of the Brussels region, Rudi Vervoort, said that the capital’s police forces as a whole are woefully understaffed. “The region has 1,200,000 residents and 800,000 commuters. However, according to the funding norms we receive funding for a population of 900,000. Guarding the European institutions and big events requires a lot of manpower. This year we are 750 police officers short,” Vervoort told reporters on December 7.
Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, set up a counter-terrorism response unit in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, and requested national experts be seconded from EU nations to help staff it. While Belgium promised to deliver, no staff had yet been sent by the time of the attacks in Brussels.
12. Molenbeek mayors who ignored warnings
For 20 years Molenbeek was run by Philippe Moureaux, a socialist mayor who encouraged large-scale immigration to the district, and under whose watch the growth of radical Salafist teaching spread through the mosques of the district.
A month before the Paris attacks, his successor, Françoise Schepmans, received a list of more than 80 suspected Islamic militants living in her district compiled by Belgian security services, according to the New York Times.
“What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists,” Schepmans told the paper. That, she added, “is the responsibility of the federal police.”
Days after the Paris attacks, Prime Minister Charles Michel promised to get tough on Molenbeek: “We’ve tried prevention. Now we’ll have to get repressive.” Yet Schepmans continued to insist as late as 20 January, “There are no areas of lawlessness in Molenbeek” and that “security is ensured everywhere.”
Many Belgians — ranging from the parents of radicalized youth to their friends — have warned police about loved ones who were among the hundreds of Belgians traveling to Syria to become trained killers.
Finding people in Molenbeek who know someone with jihadi training links is not difficult. CNN’s Erin Burnett reported on a conversation Thursday with Mohamed, a young man from Molenbeek, who claimed to know 10-15 people who had left to train in Syria.
Asked why he had not done the same, Mohamed replied: “I have a brain.”
Appearing on France 2 television Thursday night, Moureaux, the former longtime mayor, denied he ever “flirted with the Salafists,” but issued a couched mea culpa. “Perhaps I was too cautious in terms of the social diversity” in Molenbeek, he said. “At the end of my mandate [in 2012] I saw the rise of forms of extremism that I had not known before,” he said.
Kate Day and Giulia Paravicini contributed reporting to this article.
This article has been amended to correctly spell the name of the Belgian prime minister’s spokesperson.