Brussels airport said it would not reopen yesterday despite drills to test resuming partial services after the suicide bombings that struck its departure hall and a metro train, as Belgium lowered the death toll to 32.
Zaventem Airport has been closed since twin bombings wrecked the departure hall on Tuesday last week, in coordinated suicide attacks that were claimed by the Islamic State group and which also hit Maalbeek Metro Station in central Brussels.
A total of 32 people were killed in Belgium’s worst-ever terrorist attacks, the government said, down from an earlier toll of 35 following confusion between two lists of people who had died at the scene and in hospital.
“After thorough verification: number of victims goes down to 32. Still 94 people in hospital,” Belgian Minister of Health Maggie de Block said on Twitter.
All the victims have now been identified — many of them foreign nationals, testament to the cosmopolitan nature of a city that is home to both the EU and NATO.
Hundreds of employees returned to the airport on Tuesday for a large-scale test run to determine if services could partially resume from yesterday — but those hopes were dashed.
Airport spokeswoman Anke Fransen said authorities were reviewing the results of the practice run, adding: “We hope to reach a decision on a partial reopening of the airport in the course of [yesterday] morning.”
Airport chief executive officer Arnaud Feist has warned it could take “months” for Zaventem to be fully operational again.
Air Brussels told reporters it was experiencing “the most serious crisis” in its history because of the closure, with about 5 million euros (US$5.66 million) per day in lost earnings.
The city’s metro system was set to be largely back to normal again from yesterday, apart from Maelbeek Metro Station where the bombing took place.
In the Portuguese town of Leiria, emotional soccer fans fell silent for one minute on Tuesday night at the start of a friendly match against Belgium that was supposed to take place in Brussels.
The Belgian team, which lost 2-1, wore shirts that read: “In memory of all victims, Brussels, 22.03.2016.”
As Brussels struggles to get back on its feet, criticism of authorities’ handling of the case has mounted after the sole suspect charged over the attacks was freed on Monday for lack of evidence.
Prosecutors had charged the suspect, named by media as Faycal Cheffou, with “terrorist murder” and were investigating whether he was the third airport attacker who fled after his bomb did not detonate.
However, the hunt is now back on for the so-called “man in the hat,” seen in closed-circuit TV footage next to the two suicide bombers at the airport.
The man’s lawyer, Olivier Martins, told RTBF TV his client was let go because he had an alibi, based on telephone analysis, that showed he was at home at the time of the attacks.
The inquiry into the attacks has been dogged by accusations that Belgium missed a series of leads in cracking down on a Muslim militant network linked to the Brussels bombings as well as the Nov. 13 last year Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
In the most damning revelation, Turkey has accused Belgium of ignoring warnings from Ankara after it deported airport suicide bomber Ibrahim el-Bakraoui as a “terrorist fighter” last year following his arrest near the Syrian border.
In a development sure to raise fresh questions about whether enough was done to prevent the carnage, a Dutch minister also revealed that the FBI shared information with the Netherlands about el-Bakraoui and his brother Khalid el-Bakraoui — the metro bomber — six days before the attacks.
Raids and arrests in Belgium, France and the Netherlands since the Brussels bombings have exposed a complex web of Muslim militant cells, underscoring the need for coordination.
Dutch prosecutors said that a French suspect — arrested in Rotterdam at the weekend in connection with a foiled plot to attack France — intends to fight his extradition to France.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and