Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday said his country had deported one of the Brussels suicide bombers this past summer, but the man was subsequently freed in the Netherlands because investigators couldn’t establish that he had any links to terror groups.
While Mr. Erdogan didn’t identify the man, Turkish officials said it was Ibrahim El Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian identified as one of the suicide bombers who carried out the coordinated attacks that killed at least 31 people on Tuesday.
Mr. Erdogan said the man was detained near the Syrian border in the summer, deported to the Netherlands at the man’s request and allowed to go free.
“Despite our warnings that this person is a foreign terrorist fighter, Belgium wasn’t able to make the terrorism connection,” Mr. Erdogan said.
Mr. El Bakraoui was identified by Belgian authorities as one of two suicide bombers to hit the check-in hall at Brussels Airport early on Tuesday. An hour later, his brother, Khalid, carried out a suicide bombing in the city’s subway system.
The revelation has raised questions about gaps in Europe’s counterterrorism efforts, which have been hobbled in the past by poor intelligence-sharing and cooperation.
Turkish officials said that Ibrahim El Bakraoui was arrested by Turkish police last summer during a raid targeting suspected Islamic State supporters in Gaziantep, a city near the Syrian border.
Officials said they suspected that Mr. El Bakraoui was trying to enter Syria to link up with Islamic State and told Belgian authorities they had captured one of their citizens.
According to Turkish officials, Belgian police told their Turkish counterparts that Mr. El Bakraoui had a record for petty crimes, but that they could find no evidence that he was a terror threat.
“They were not interested in him as a terror suspect,” said one Turkish official.
When Belgian authorities expressed no interest in Mr. El Bakraoui, Turkish officials said, the suspect asked to be sent to the Netherlands, which was his right as a citizen of a European Union country.
Koen Geens, Belgium’s Justice Minister, said Mr. El Bakraoui hadn’t been identified as a potential terrorist when Turkish authorities detained him last summer.
“At that time, he wasn’t known to Belgian authorities for terrorism, but only criminal acts,” he said on public broadcaster VRT.
It was the second time that Turkey has claimed European officials ignored a warning about an attacker. Turkish officials said they had identified one of the assailants in the Paris attacks as a terrorism suspect and twice notified French authorities.
Omar Ismail Mostefai, named by French police as one of the seven suspects involved in the Paris attacks, arrived in Turkey in 2013 and was flagged last year as a terrorism threat to authorities in France, a senior Turkish official said.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-...brussels-suicide-bombers-in-summer-1458757158
