Brussels: Belgium Monday freed the sole suspect charged over last week’s Islamic State attacks in Brussels due to a lack of evidence, raising fresh questions about the handling of the case by under-fire Belgian authorities.
Prosecutors had charged the man identified as Faycal C on Saturday with offences including “terrorist murder”, and had been investigating the theory that he was a third airport attacker who fled when his bomb failed to go off.
His release comes as a new blow to an inquiry already dogged by accusations that Belgium missed a series of leads in cracking down on a jihadist network linked to the attacks and a similar assault in Paris in November.
Police Sunday released CCTV footage of a third suspect in the March 22 Zaventem airport attack, the so-called “man in the hat” seen with two other men who blew themselves up.
Officials also updated the death toll from the bombings at the airport and at Maalbeek metro station to 35, the worst terror attacks in Belgium’s history, after four more people had died in hospital. Mourners were set to hold an Easter Monday church service in memory of the victims.
The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement that “the indications that led to the arrest of Faycal C were not substantiated by the ongoing inquiry. As a result, the subject has been released by the examining magistrate.”
The Belgian justice and interior ministers acknowledged that their departments should have acted on a Turkish alert about Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a convicted Belgian criminal briefly arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of terrorist activity, who turned out to be one of the suicide bombers.
And the Belgian prosecutor’s office said that man’s brother, Khalid — another suicide bomber — had been wanted since December in connection with the Paris attacks.
