BRUSSELS — Belgium’s justice and interior ministers acknowledged Thursday that the authorities had erred by not acting on Turkey’s request last year that they take custody of a Belgian citizen arrested for suspected terrorist activity. The man was one of the Islamic State suicide bombers in the devastating Brussels attacks.
The acknowledgments by the justice minister, Koen Geens, and interior minister, Jan Jambon, were the first high-level Belgian admissions of blunder in the aftermath of the bombings Tuesday. The attacks have exposed missteps by European security officials and police, just four months after the Islamic State’s assault on targets in Paris.
“What’s essential in the story is that with the passing on of the information from Turkey and with the passing on of the information within Belgium, we have been slower than one could have expected under those circumstances,” Geens said on Flemish television in Belgium. “So, the information was passed on, but we have not been diligent, or probably not diligent enough.”
Jambon told the newspaper Le Soir that there had been “two types of mistakes, at the level of the Justice Ministry and at the level of the liaison officer in Turkey, which involves the Interior and Justice ministries.”
Both ministers offered their resignations Thursday, an implicit acknowledgment of responsibility for perhaps having failed to avert the bombings at the Brussels airport and a downtown subway station that left 31 people dead and 300 wounded. With Belgium at its maximum state of terrorist alert and numerous police raids underway, Prime Minister Charles Michel rejected the resignation offers.
But questions proliferated about what law enforcement authorities did — and failed to do— to thwart the bombers, who appeared to be part of the same Islamic State network that carried out the Paris attacks in November.
The most glaring lapse, which Turkey’s president first raised publicly on Wednesday, appeared to be Belgian officials’ inaction on a Turkish request in June that Belgium take custody of Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who had been arrested in Turkey as a suspected terrorist for trying to enter Syria. This week, El Bakraoui was one of two brothers identified as being among the three suicide bombers in Brussels.
When Belgium did not act on the notification, Turkish officials said, they deported El Bakraoui to the Netherlands at his request.
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