Belgium pays this Monday a tribute to the victims of the jihadist attacks of March 22, 2016, on the fifth anniversary of a tragedy considered the worst suffered by the country since World War II.
“The country is not the same after those attacks. A threat that until then we thought was theoretical has become very real,” Charles Michel, who is now president of the European Council and was Belgian prime minister when the events occurred, told AFP.
On the morning of March 22, 2016, a double suicide attack was first recorded at the Zaventem airport, and a little later another at the Maalbek metro station, in the city center.
The attacks killed 32 civilians and injured more than 300. Three jihadists died. Later, the radical Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The investigations revealed that the perpetrators of the attacks belonged to a Franco-Belgian cell linked to the attacks perpetrated on the night of November 13, 2015 in Paris, which caused 130 deaths and more than 400 injured.
Thus, the attacks in Brussels would have been organized in response to the rapid progress of the investigations, after French experts detected that the several responsible for the massacre in Paris had come from the Belgian capital.
“I still remember the moment I received the news. When the Interior Minister called me to inform me, minutes after the attack in Zaventem, I went directly to the crisis control center,” Michel told AFP.
At Zaventem airport, first two men set off explosives in their luggage in the check-in line, and about nine seconds later there was another loud explosion in the boarding area.
An hour later a device exploded in the Maalbek metro station.
At the airport, a third jihadist, identified as Mohamed Abrini, did not detonate his explosives and was arrested in April of that same year.
– A tragic day –
In January 2021, 10 suspects were referred to a Criminal Court for “murders committed in a terrorist context”.
The group includes Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the November 13 commandos that attacked in Paris and who is in custody in France.
There is also Osama Atar, suspected of having planned the attacks and probably killed in Syria, who could be tried in his absence.
Among those who can be sentenced to life imprisonment are Abrini, known as “the man in the hat” (from the video footage in Zaventem) and Osama Krayem, who accompanied the suicide bomber from the subway station.
In addition to the death toll and injuries, the attacks caused a serious political crisis just two days later, when it was discovered that one of the jihadists who blew himself up in Zaventem, the Belgian Ibrahim El Bakraoui, had been arrested in Turkey a year earlier.
After being expelled from Turkey, he had simply disappeared from the Belgian intelligence services.
The interior and justice ministers submitted their resignations, but Michel refused to accept them.
“The officials do not abandon ship in a storm, and there was no personal responsibility of any of them,” Michel told AFP.
“It would have been irresponsible to aggravate a political crisis at times of maximum security pressure. Belgium has not experienced violence of this magnitude since World War II,” he explained.