Brussels bombers not heroic warriors

The suicide bombers in Belgium had a background in crime, not religion, and all were known to police.

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'Hunted' Brussels suicide brothers abandoned crime for jihad

Brussels, AFP – Long before blowing themselves up in crowds of innocent people, suicide bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui and his brother Khalid lived the lives of the classic Brussels hoodlum.

Carjackings, robberies and shoot-outs with police were just some of the convictions collected by the Belgian brothers who took part in the metro (subway) and airport assaults in Brussels claimed by the Islamic State group.

Both were said to have links with top Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam, while the third identified Brussels attacker, Najim Laachraoui, was the suspected bomb-maker for the November rampage in the French capital.

Baby-faced Ibrahim, 29, who blew himself up at the airport on Tuesday along with Laachraoui, had been given a nine-year sentence in 2010 after a gunfight with police, according to local media.

He took part in a bungled robbery at a Western Union office in which a police officer was injured in the leg.

Turkey said it had detained Ibrahim in June last year as a "foreign terrorist fighter" and then deported him to the Netherlands.

President Recept Tayyip Erdogan said the Belgian authorities had failed to confirm his links to terrorism "despite our warnings" and had later released him, although it is not immediately clear when he crossed to Belgium from the Netherlands.

Ibrahim, seen on CCTV footage with two other suspects pushing airport trolleys with their bomb-laden bags, left a confused and scared message on an abandoned computer, according to the Belgian federal prosecutor.

"Hunted everywhere... no longer safe," Ibrahim said in the message. "I don't know what to do."

His younger brother Khalid, 27, who blew himself up at the Maalbeek metro station just a short walk from the main EU institutions, was a convicted carjacker, receiving a five-year sentence in 2011.

Federal prosecutors revealed Wednesday that both were Belgian citizens with convictions "not linked to terrorism".

The second airport bomber was named as Najim Laachraoui, 24, who was captured on the CCTV footage with Ibrahim and another assailant who is the subject of a massive manhunt after his bomb did not go off and he fled the scene.

Moroccan-born Laachraoui grew up in Schaarbeek and had been wanted by police over the Paris attacks since December, though by a false identity that was only unmasked last week.

Laachraoui attended Schaarbeek's Sainte-Famille Catholic school for six years where an official told AFP he was a "typical" student.

Laachraoui went to Syria in September 2013 in one of the first waves of jihadists to leave Belgium for the war-torn country, where he fought under the Islamic State name Abu Idriss, according to media reports.

In February, a Belgian court convicted him in absentia for his involvement with IS.

He was known to have returned to Europe in September when he was checked by police under a false identity in a Mercedes driven by Abdeslam, who now sits behind bars in Belgium.

You can read our previous coverage here: http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/906612/brussels-under-attack-gunfire-explosions-at-the-airport

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