Belgian brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui have been named as the two airport suicide bombers – and the man on the run is master Paris massacre bombmaker Najim Laachraoui, Belgian media have said today.
The El Bakraoui siblings, who were already on the run from police after they escaped a raid a week ago, were pictured on CCTV in the departures hall wearing black gloves to hide the detonators for their suicide vests.
They exploded their bombs packed with nails and bolts, in the first of twin terror attacks on the Belgian capital that left at least 34 people dead.
Najim Laachraoui, who is suspected of building the bombs for the Paris attacks that killed 130 people in five attacks last November, calmly walked out of Brussels Airport yesterday moments before his two accomplices massacred 14 people.
He is now the world’s most wanted man – as police and the security services try to trace his steps and prevent another attack.
The brothers were the same two men that fled a Brussels police raid last week where police shot and killed Paris bombing suspect Mohamed Belkaid.
The raid carried out last Tuesday on a flat in the Brussels suburb of Forest saw a sniper kill Belkaid while the El Bakraoui brothers managed to escape police.
Police acted on a tip-off in connection to the Paris terror attacks, and carried out the raid in Forest, which is close to Molenbeek, where several jihadis behind the Paris attacks lived.
While there was initial speculation that the raid had aimed to capture Paris-terrorist Salah Abdeslam, who was arrested later in the week in a separate operation, this was later denied by a police spokesman.
Belkaid, an Algerian national who was illegally in Belgium, was found with an ISIS flag, AK-47 assault rifle and a book of jihadist literature next to his body.
At the time police said: ‘two persons [the El Bakraoui brothers] who were probably in the flat fled the scene and are being tracked down’.
Less than one week later, Khalid and Brahim El Bakraoui carried out the terrorist attack at Brussels airport and as passengers queued to check in for flights at around 8am local time (7am in Britain) the first blast rang out.
Moments later as people fled towards the entrance of Brussels Zaventem Airport, a second much bigger blast in front of them brought down much of the ceiling and sent razor-sharp shrapnel, body parts and clouds of thick dust and smoke billowing through the building.
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(Selorm) | 
(Nana Kwesi)