Brussels attacks: Nine alleged security failures by Belgian authorities

A record of blunders, breakdowns in communication and policy deficiencies reinforces the gloomy appraisal of the country’s own interior minister who described Belgium as Europe’s “weakest link” in countering terrorism.

Masked Belgian police secure the area around the Palais de Justice courthouse in Brussels on March 24, 2016. Christian Hartmann/Reuters

MARSEILLE // Belgium is facing scathing criticism for security failures that indirectly helped known extremists plan and carry out both the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks.

A record of blunders, breakdowns in communication and policy deficiencies reinforces the gloomy appraisal of the country’s own interior minister, Jan Jambon. Even before the Paris attacks of last November 13, he described Belgium as Europe’s “weakest link” in countering terrorism.

Mr Jambon said on Thursday he and justice minister Koen Geens had offered their resignations but that they had been turned down by prime minister Charles Michel.

While other Belgian officials reject much of the criticism as unfair, there has been no convincing response on a number of specific issues.

The most recent suggestion of a lax approach to individuals whose activities or movements should have aroused suspicion concerns Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the two suicide bombers at Brussels airport.

The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that El Bakraoui, known to Belgian authorities as a violent criminal, was detained near the Syrian border in June. He was deported to the Netherlands before returning to his native Belgium.

Although Belgium’s justice minister denies El Bakraoui had been flagged as a possible terrorist, Mr Erdogan said: “Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter, the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism.”

But the dispute over what Belgium should have done when alerted to the arrest of a dangerous man at, of all locations, the Turkish-Syrian border is only one of the issues troubling analysts.

Despite its small size and a population of only 11 million, Belgium struggles more than any other European country with home-grown extremists. While more French, British and German nationals have joined ISIL and similar groups, the number from Belgium to have done so, estimated at 500 as of last year, is the highest per capita for any European nation.

In the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks, questions have been raised about:

• A failure to alert French authorities to the activities of Salah Abdeslam, arrested in Brussels last week as a key suspect in the Paris attacks. Though brought up in the heavily Moroccan Brussels district of Molenbeek, Abdeslam has French nationality and was allegedly known for his radicalism as well as more conventional criminality since 2014. Because his name did not appear on France’s list of terror suspects, he was allowed unhindered through controls on his way back to Belgium the morning after the attacks

• The inability of Belgian authorities to locate Abdeslam in his four months of hiding, despite the fact he was finally discovered in a flat just 700 metres from his family’s home in Molenbeek. The flat was also a short distance from the bar Abdeslam formerly ran with his brother, Brahim, who blew himself up during the Paris attacks

• Boasting in an online ISIL publication by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged ringleader of the Paris attacks who was killed five days later in a shoot-out with police, of being able to travel freely between Belgium and Syria despite his name and photograph being “all over the news”

• Inadequate security measures at Brussels’ Zaventem international airport, an obvious terrorist target at a time when prosecutors believed Abdeslam had been planning attacks in Brussels

• Top-heavy bureaucracy in Belgium’s dual-language system, impeding effective policing of so-called “extremist hotbeds” such as Molenbeek

• Insufficient recruitment of intelligence and police officers of Arab and African backgrounds

• Years of underfunding of security services, addressed only after the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris last January and, a few days later, a shoot-out with extremists in the city of Verviers

• Reluctance by Belgium’s intelligence service to share information with counterparts in other European countries – or even, on occasion, their own police.

The National has asked for responses from Belgium's Coordination and Crisis Centre and a spokesman for Mr Jambon. No reply had been received as we went to press on Thursday.

Mr Jambon, also the country’s deputy prime minister, has previously acknowledged shortcomings in the Belgian security services.

Just three days before 130 people died in the Paris atrocities, he told a conference organised by the politico.com current affairs website that while Belgium was recording some counter-extremism successes in most cities, Brussels remained an exception.

Mr Jambon highlighted divisions between national and regional authorities and a cumbersome police structure.

“Brussels is a relatively small city, 1.2 million,” he said. “And yet we have six police departments. Nineteen different municipalities. New York is a city of 11 million. How many police departments do they have? One.”

Perhaps few officials would openly go so far as Alain Chouet, a former security chief of the DGSE, France’s external intelligence service, who said several of the Paris attackers were extremists “well known in Brussels’” and that “someone clearly screwed up”.

But French president Francois Hollande spoke of the Paris slaughter being “planned in Syria, prepared and organised in Belgium”.

Alain Winants, who retired as head of Belgium’s Surete de l’Etat intelligence service in 2014, has pointed to a funding crisis that had hampered his agents’ work, though he recognised that more resources were made available from last year.

"It's only a pity that you need events like those that happened in Paris and in Brussels to make politicians aware of the necessity," he told Britain's Financial Times after the Paris attacks, the Brussels reference inspired by a shooting at the city's Jewish Museum in May 2014 that killed four.

“Security has a price and one has to be willing to pay that price, and if one doesn’t, things could go wrong.”

* additional reporting by Agence France-Presse