Belgian official asks critics to focus on suspects

Associated Press

BRUSSELS

Belgium’s justice minister pleaded Tuesday for critics of Belgium’s intelligence failures to focus on the hunt for those behind last week’s Brussels attacks and November’s massacre in Paris.

Investigators say they are still looking for at least one suspect in the attacks seven days ago, when suicide bombers killed 32 people at Brussels’ airport and in a subway station near the European Union headquarters. Three suicide bombers also blew themselves up.

Belgium has faced rising international criticism over its evident inability to identify and monitor Islamic State activists living in the Belgian capital who have been deemed responsible both for the March 22 bombings in Brussels and the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris nightspots that left 130 dead. Several of those who killed themselves during the attacks or were subsequently arrested were Belgian nationals of North African background.

Authorities in Belgium and the neighboring Netherlands faced fresh questions Tuesday about how much they knew in advance of the March 22 bombings. Turkey already has revealed it deported one of the suicide bombers, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, to the Netherlands in mid-2015 after catching him near the Syrian border and identifying him to Dutch authorities as a suspected IS militant.