When Brussels police caught Salah Abdeslam, suspected sole survivor of November’s suicide assault on Paris, they knew they were in a race against time to stop a new Dae’sh attack.
It was the afternoon of Friday, March 18, and one of Prime Minister Charles Michel’s cabinet ministers tweeted “We got him!” after Europe’s most wanted man was seized at a house in the capital’s Molenbeek neighbourhood.
But Michel was worried, according to a government official who was present at the time. The premier raced to his crisis command centre from a European summit nearby.
Security forces had orders to increase vigilance but lacked intelligence to justify a citywide lockdown such as Michel imposed after the Paris attacks.
“Our first thought was that ... this will set off a ferocious response,” the aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Those fears were well founded. The suicide bombings of Brussels airport and a metro train that killed 28 bystanders laid bare the inability of the Belgian authorities to counter Dae’sh militants, no matter how high the level of alert.
Missed connections, leads not followed and suspects let slip have exposed deficiencies in security services. They have also shown how Europe’s Syrian-trained Islamist cells can react with deadly speed to events such as Abdeslam’s arrest.
“It was a race against time,” said Vincent Gilles, head of Belgium’s main police trade union SLFP.
But with the intelligence service understaffed - by some estimates by about half the level for other rich European states - it was a race the authorities could not win.
Year on alert
Belgium is, for its size, the biggest European supplier of foreign fighters in Syria. Dae’sh has appealed to an alienated generation descended from mostly Moroccan immigrants of the 1960s.
In the first half of 2015, Belgian courts convicted dozens of radical preachers and their followers for recruiting for Syria. But new cells were forming elsewhere.
It was with shock, after 130 people died on a Friday evening in the French capital and trails led back to Brussels, that Michel’s government realised it had an urgent problem.
He locked down transport and public spaces for days as he was near “100% certain” of a threat.
New resources, too late
Michel pledged cash and legal reforms to beef up a security system that officials accepted was understaffed.
An intelligence service of about 700 staff for a country of 11m struggled to cope, as did a police force that is about 20% below full strength.
Police and security services have also struggled with a lack of communication and coordination across a multiplicity of departments that cross Belgium’s Dutch-French language divide.
Two of Tuesday’s suicide bombers - Najim Laachraoui and Khalid El Bakraoui - were on counter-terrorism watchlists. The former was a suspected bombmaker for the Paris attacks; the latter rented a safe house for the Paris cell and the flat where police picked up Abdeslam’s trail.
In their four-month search for Abdeslam, police pulled in dozens of people, holding 10 by last month.
Three days of fear
Over the three and half days following that arrest, the government considered locking down Brussels but decided against it because they had no clear clues that an attack was in the offing, the government official said.
When the bombers struck at the morning rush hour on Tuesday, the authorities tried to moved fast.
A taxi driver who took the bombers to the airport led police to the apartment where he had picked them up. That produced a evidence including chemicals and another bomb. Another witness who, investigators say, has since identified a third man seen on airport cameras with the two bombers.
Police have been rolling up contacts and acquaintances of those identified, including another suspected plotter in Paris.
Michel’s government is also cracking down on fake documents which seem to have allowed the likes of Laachraoui and Abaaoud, to slip across Europe from Syria.
The government has sought new legal powers over, and in cooperation with, Internet and telecoms firms to track suspects.
But officials caution that it could take years to fill the gaps in the security structures of a country that is host to the European Union and Nato.
Michel declared simply: “What we feared, has happened.”
