On Thursday, Belgium's high ranking officials acknowledged errors and miscommunications in the prelude to the Brussels suicide bombings which took the lives of 31 people. The Belgian interior and justice ministers also acknowledged that their departments should have acted on a Turkish alert about a convicted Belgian criminal briefly arrested in Turkey in 2015 over suspicion of terrorist activity.
France 24 reported that the justice and interior ministers tendered their resignations as tension and pressure mounted on the government of Belgium over the claims that it ignored the deportation of airport bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui from Turkey in 2015 as a foreign terrorist fighter. The ministers who were under fire for intelligence failure were to resign on Thursday as police hunted two suspects who are still on the run after the bombings.
According to The New York Times, new raids linked to the Brussels bombings were conducted on Thursday night in the city's Jette and Schaerbeek neighborhoods, and the police officers arrested six individuals for questioning. At the same time, French officials said a French national had been arrested in the Argenteuil suburb of Paris on suspicion that he was involved in the advanced stages of a terrorist plot. However, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said there were no clear details yet about the links between that plot and the Brussels and Paris attacks.
Meanwhile, Justice Minister Koen Geens confirmed that the Turkish police had previously apprehended Ibrahim El Bakraoui, saying authorities had not heeded their warnings to detain Ibrahim in Belgium.
The acknowledgement made by the justice and interior ministers mark the first major admission from a high-ranking Belgian official that the government committed an error that could have led to the terror attacks, says Time.
Both interior minister Jan Jambon and Koen Geens offered to step down on Thursday, but Prime Minister Charles Michel rejected their resignations. The attacks in Brussels on March 22 have exposed Belgium's competency to rise to security challenges.
