The Brussels attacks of March 2016, being commemorated this week, were the work of the same jihadist cell that struck Paris just months earlier — in both cases the country’s worst peacetime massacre.
After the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, which left 130 people dead at the Bataclan concert hall and other sites, investigators later established that senior cell members were planning further operations.
Potential targets are thought to have included French venues linked to the Euro football tournament and possibly Schiphol airport in the Netherlands — but it was ultimately in Brussels they struck next.
Having retreated to safe houses in the Belgian capital, the jihadists mounted a hastily organised attack in the days after the March 18 arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the Paris commando group.
Both the Paris and Brussels attacks were claimed by the Islamic State group.
– Terror at airport and metro –
The morning of March 22, shortly before 8:00 am, three members of the cell pulled up by taxi to Brussels Airport in Zaventem.
In the departures hall, hundreds of passengers were queuing to check in.
Surveillance images that later spread around the world showed the men walking side by side, pushing luggage trolleys carrying suitcases — filled with explosives.
One of the three, wearing a hat and glasses, left his bag on the floor and fled the scene just before the attacks.
At 7:58 am, a first suicide bomber, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, detonated his bomb.
Moments later the second, Najim Laachraoui, triggered his explosives, causing a more powerful blast.
Sixteen people were killed. Dozens more lay wounded on the floor, covered in dust, blood, and debris from shattered metal and glass, beneath a partially collapsed ceiling.
Shortly after the arrival of the bomb disposal squad, the bag left behind by the third man, identified weeks later as Mohamed Abrini, exploded by accident.
It contained more explosives than the two others but no one was injured.
At 9:11 am, horror struck again, this time in a metro station in Brussels’ European quarter.
Khalid El Bakraoui, the younger brother of the first airport bomber, detonated his device on a train about to leave Maelbeek station.
Sixteen more people were killed. As in Zaventem, the victims and wounded spanned many nationalities.
– Marathon trial, heavy sentences –
Because of the sequence of events, French courts were the first to hold a trial over the attacks.
In autumn 2022, Brussels opened its own marathon proceedings — the country’s largest ever criminal trial with 10 defendants and around 1,000 civil parties appearing before a jury.
The following summer, Salah Abdeslam — already sentenced to life at his French trial — was found guilty of murder for helping organise the Brussels attacks.
The court ruled that his existing 20-year Belgian sentence — for a related shootout with police earlier in March 2016 — covered both offences.
The second defendant Mohamed Abrini — a childhood friend of Abdeslam, also convicted in Paris — was sentenced in Belgium to 30 years in prison.
Six others were found guilty of participating in or aiding the Brussels attacks, while two were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Three received life sentences: Belgian-Moroccans Oussama Atar (tried in absentia and presumed dead in Syria) and Bilal El Makhoukhi, along with Swede Osama Krayem, who had entered the metro system with explosives but abandoned his plan.
Tunisian Sofien Ayari, like Abdeslam already sentenced over the March police shootout, avoided an additional prison term under the same legal reasoning.
Finally, Ali El Haddad Asufi and Herve Bayingana Muhirwa were sentenced to 20 years and 10 years in prison, respectively.