Brussels Attack – Police Identify Two Brothers As Suicide Bombers

Brussels: Two of the men who carried out the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday have been identified by the Belgian police as a pair of brother — Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, and Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27.

Both the men, who were identified by their fingerprints and on security cameras, were born in Belgium, and had criminal records for armed robbery but were not previously linked by investigators to Islamist militants.
Raids, arrests and forensic analysis are some of the tools investigators are using to get to the bottom of who was behind the attacks in Brussels, which killed 31 people and wounded 270 others. But the investigation is far from finished. Belgian counterterrorism official Paul Van Tigchelt on Wednesday said that with at least one suspect on the run, the stakes are high. Tuesday's attacks followed Friday's arrest of a man in Brussels, Salah Abdeslam, who was the main fugitive of the November killings in France.

Police are looking for a third suspect who was recorded by a security camera alongside Ibrahim el-Bakraoui at the airport. A fourth man, one of the three airport bombers, is still unidentified.

Antwerp Mayor Bart de Wever said: “We are experiencing the darkest day in the history of our country since the Second World War.”

The neighboring nations of France, Germany and the Netherlands have tightened border security immediately after the Brussels attacks, as did Britain.

The attacks, claimed by jihadist group Islamic State (IS), murdered people at Brussels international airport and on a metro train in the heart of the Belgian capital, Brussels on Tuesday.