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![\"Belgium](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/69bfc25d134f9baf6afabd9b.jpg\")
<\/p>\n BRUSSELS
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Police officers lay a flower wreath in front of a memorial plaque during a commemoration on the 10th anniversary of the March 22, 2016 Brussels attacks, at Brussels International Airport in Zaventem, Belgium, Sunday, March 22, 2026. <\/p>\n
Belgium<\/a> Sunday marked 10 years since the 2016 jihadist bombings in Brussels, a trauma that still scars the country and that authorities say sharpened focus on intelligence and counterterrorism.<\/p>\n The March 22 attacks claimed by ISIL left 32 people dead and more than 300 wounded, Belgium’s worst peacetime massacre.<\/p>\n Survivors, watched on by Prime Minister Bart de Wever, King Phillipe and Queen Mathilde, recounted the harrowing scenes they witnessed that morning, as the remembrance ceremonies began just before 8 a.m. at Brussels Airport in Zaventem.<\/p>\n The proceedings arrived an hour later at the Maelbeek metro station, also targeted in the coordinated suicide blasts that ripped through the Belgian capital, before culminating at a monument in memory of the victims in central Brussels.<\/p>\n The Brussels attacks were the work of the same jihadist cell that struck Paris just months earlier on Nov. 13, 2015, killing 130 people.<\/p>\n Having retreated to Brussels safe houses, the jihadists mounted a hastily organized attack<\/a> in the days after the March 18 arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the Paris attack group.<\/p>\n On March 22, a Tuesday morning, three suicide bombers detonated their explosives, first at Zaventem and then at a packed metro station close to the seat of EU institutions.<\/p>\n In Belgium, the threat level remains “serious” at three on a scale of four, following an October 2023 attack in Brussels that saw a gunman shoot dead two Swedish football fans before being killed by police.<\/p>\n