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Updated 10.10am
SEVEN TERROR SUSPECTS were in custody in Belgium and France today as under-fire European authorities stepped up the fight against jihadist networks following triple bombings in Brussels claimed by the Islamic State group.
Six people were being held after raids across the Belgian capital yesterday, two days after airport and metro suicide blasts that left 31 people dead and 300 injured.
And in the Paris suburbs, police arrested a man accused of plotting an attack in France that was “in the advanced stages” and found a small stash of explosives.
In Brussels, families faced an agonising wait after forensic experts warned it could take weeks to identify fatalities.
US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks with the Belgian authorities, who have faced heavy criticism over how the Brussels attackers – at least three of whom were known to authorities – slipped through the net.
Jihadist connections
The man arrested in Paris was a French national who “belongs to a terrorist network that sought to strike our country”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said late yesterday, hailing the “major arrest”.
Police evacuated an apartment block in the rundown northern suburb of Argenteuil, where a small quantity of explosives was found.
While Cazeneuve said no link to the Paris or Brussels attacks had emerged, police sources said today that the suspect had in July been found guilty in absentia, alongside Paris ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, of being part of a group planning to go to Syria.
Named by police sources as Reda K., Cazeneuve said the suspect had been under surveillance “for several weeks” and his arrest was the result of “close and constant cooperation between European services”.
European authorities are under huge pressure to better coordinate the tracking of homegrown extremists and those returning from Syria, as evidence grows of a thriving jihadist network straddling France and Belgium.
Warning signs
Prosecutors have confirmed that Khalid El Bakraoui, who blew himself up at Maalbeek metro station shortly after his brother Ibrahim did the same at Zaventem airport, was the subject of an international terrorism warrant over the Paris attacks.
Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been arrested and deported by Turkey, which had warned Belgium he was a “foreign terrorist fighter,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.
The brothers were also listed in American terrorism databases, television network NBC reported.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said yesterday the “attacks did not come as a surprise”, raising further questions why international authorities failed to stop the bombers.
Belgium’s interior and justice ministers, Jan Jambon and Koen Geens, offered to quit yesterday after widespread criticism over intelligence failures, but Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel refused to accept their resignations.
The Brussels attacks also came four days after Salah Abdeslam, the prime suspect in the Paris attacks who had been on the run for four months, was arrested in a dramatic raid in the city, just around the corner from his family home.
Abdeslam’s lawyer Sven Mary said yesterday his client “didn’t know” in advance about the Brussels attacks, and said he would no longer fight extradition to France.
Massive manhunt
A huge manhunt is ongoing for a third attacker at Brussels airport whose bomb did not go off, a man wearing a hat seen on security footage.
Police are also hunting a man with a large bag captured on CCTV talking to Khalid El Bakraoui at Maalbeek station, who then did not get on to the train with the bomber, police sources told AFP.
A series of raids in the capital yesterday yielded six arrests – included three people detained “outside the door of the federal prosecutor’s office”, a spokesman for the prosecution service said.
It was unknown whether the arrests included either of the key suspects sought over the worst attacks in the country’s history.
Belgium has lowered its terror alert to the second-highest level for the first time since the attacks, but the police and military presence on the streets of the capital remains high.
People of around 40 nationalities were killed or wounded in the attack, testament to the cosmopolitan nature of Europe’s symbolic capital.
Very few of the dead have been formally identified. Forensic experts, working with teeth, fingerprints and DNA, are sometimes relying just on tiny fragments of bodies and warn that the process could take weeks.
Tales of lucky escapes from the attacks have been emerging, along with cases of tragic ill fortune of people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Among only three fatalities formally named was Peruvian Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz, 37. Her husband Christophe Delcambe, and their three-year-old twin daughters, only survived because the girls had run off and their father had chased after them.
Harrowing new footage of the moments after the airport attack has emerged on Belgian television, showing a lone baby left crying in the wreckage next to the lifeless body of a woman.
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How bout longer sentences for the people committing the crimes and then in turn there will be less people needing to hide behind the screens
@Dlow Brown: careful, the liberal left brigade and their allies the Irish Council for Civil Liberties will have you shut down for hate speech!
@Damien Mooney: your an idiot the vast majority of people want longer sentences regardless of political leanings
@Kevin Finnegan: can please elect some of this vast majority so that they reflect they opinions of the vast majority.
@Dave Doyle: Judges aren’t elected.
@Lisa Saputo: the elected officials make laws….those laws can include mandatory minimum sentences or whatever the law makers set as the law. The law makers need to be tougher…IMHO. Then the judges will not be able to squirm out. We could very easily have a 3 strikes out law
@Dave Doyle: @Dave Doyle: well said. The ‘vast majority’ are happy to peddle faux outrage. Signing the latest petition on change.org to have Martin Nolan fired while banging furiously into their keyboards such inane comments as “there are no words”
“Should rot in hell”
“Suspended sentence a joke”
“Down with this sort of thing”
“Have they no homes to go to”
@Kevin Finnegan: ah right, so this elusive bunch of people known as ‘the majority of people’ elected you as their spokesman? What are you and your merry band of followers doing about lenient sentences then, apart from writing asinine, meaningless sentences into the journal.ie ? How many letters have you sent to the dept of justice and law reform, and the DPP herself, asking that lenient sentences be reviewed? Perhaps we could meet up and pursue a strategy, I’ve sent several so far this year with a few more ready to go.
Or are you happy to peddle your faux outrage on Facebook in the faint hope that Ms Loftus will log into the journal.ie and read your comments and discover the horror of Martin Nolan’s work?
@Damien Mooney: haha I’ve never met or talked to anybody who was like you know what our criminal justice system really does the job well why should people get long sentences sure just give them a slap on the wrist and it’ll be grand! And as to what I do about it I try my best to be informed and vote for someone who shares my belief that there needs to be serious reform. It’s gas that you started going of on all that when my original comment was about you basically saying only people on the right care about stuff like this
@Damien Mooney: haha faux outrage you know f&ck all about me but sure believe whatever you want and just smear people on the left to make yourself feel good
About time this has been the norm in the UK for years
@Sonya Couch Dillon: VERY TRUE, & also in fact, ( to save some extra, IMO, monies on the transport of Criminals, as they are mostly brought to & from the Courts by private securicor type firms ) Judges & Govenors can order a video-link from the prison to the Court, & that goes from your Tax evader to the more Heinous Murderer type crimes & Screens & video-link testimonies have been in use in the UK for some time now, although there is some speculation that the “evidence” may not be as pure as an actual person in the Courtroom as opposed to a “link”.https://www.eyenetwork.com/judicial/court-video-link/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwxtPYBRD6ARIsAKs1XJ5wX0SUMQncL-BPsfdJr4WF7O-F_chW3TUUB9Y0sWu05GVoEJE1GcYaAvHVEALw_wcB
@Michael Kelly: Video link in operation here too, but our system is slightly different. A prisoner has a right to be present . As for the private security companies , too easily infiltrated by crime gangs.
@Michael Kelly: Careful there, You’re interfering with the super incomes of the legal profession!
Now get wrid of the stupid “reducing”of sentences and let them serve a full sentence. Also lock up repeat offenders for robbery, serious assault or any repeated crimes.
@Mick12:
The reduction in the sentence on foot of a plea of guilty is pragmatism on the part of judges to reduce the waiting list of cases. The reduction is relatively small and criminals convicted of serious sexual offences are listed on the sex offenders register so that there are legal grounds for monitoring them closely after they have served their sentences.
@Mick12: Will never happen here. Sure would’nt it be an injustice not to fill the pockets of the poor auld Ambulance chasers.
Long over due ,glad to see some one is listening .
More prisons please and longer sentences. That is what people want. Imagine the money saved from criminals not being able to father children, save on children’s allowance, save on future criminals ever being born, save on council housing, save on dole money for future offspring etc etc.
Indeed , aren’t we all behind a screen giving evidence in some way
@Noel Walsh: deep
@Noel Walsh: give it a rest noel
@Noel Walsh: Did you forget to switch accounts before replying to yourself?
@Free comment ratings: Ha ! He’s got you there Noel !
This is all about gradually changing the rules of evidence in order to tip the balance against the accused (who in any just society must be presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of law). What it will lead to is the thwarting of justice, where more innocent men, who have been maliciously (falsely) accused of rape or sexual assault, will be convicted and their lives destroyed. It is the holy grail of feminazis and the large misandrist element within the media, and certain political organisations, to prevent the full and fair cross-examination of complainants in court (such cross-examination being necessary in order to get to the truth and a just outcome in such cases). It is all part of the downgrading of evidence and examination.
Where man-haters want to get to is the point where all requirements for evidence and examination are dispensed with, and a potentially innocent man’s life can be destroyed in law simply by the word of a woman, even if she is not telling the truth.
I agree entirely with the contents of the ministerial order (and a new sentencing guideline) however the aspect preventing cross examination (as reported above) is incompatible with Art 38.1 and the established dicta in [In Re Haughey, 1IR1, 1971] and European conventions. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a challenge to that section of the order alone. Imagine acting for yourself and, in your own defense you weren’t allowed ask certain questions or challenge the prosecution evidence or put your own case forward in rebuttal. Just doesn’t seem right.
Even the headline in this media article is deliberately misleading. Complainants during such cases are not “victims”, as in the middle of a trial (particularly trials involving alleged sexual offences) it has not yet been proven that a crime has been committed, nor that the accused has done it. One only becomes a “victim” if it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt in court that a crime has been committed, and that the accused is guilty.
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