Brussels bomber ‘identified as jailer of foreign Isis hostages’

One of the two suicide bombers who killed 16 people at Brussels’ Zaventem airport last month has been identified as a former Islamic State prison guard in Syria.

French journalists seized in Syria by the terror group in 2013 have identifiedNajim Laachraoui, the presumed bomb-maker for both the Brussels attacks and those carried out in Paris in November last year, as one of the captors who held them hostage for 10 months, their lawyer said.

“I can confirm that he was the jailer of my clients,” said Marie-Laure Ingouf, a lawyer for two of the four journalists who were freed in April 2014, confirming French media reports. Ingouf said one of her clients, Nicolas Hénin, had “formally identified” the bomber.

Laachraoui, a 24-year-old Belgian national, blew himself up at the airport on 22 March with Ibrahim El Bakraoui, whose brother Khalid detonated another suicide bomb at the Maelbeek metro station shortly afterwards, killing a further 16 people. French media said the journalists had recognised Laachraoui as one of their captors, known to them as Abou Idriss, when his photograph was published in the aftermath of the Brussels attacks.

They had earlier identified another of their jailers as Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman currently in custody after killing four people in an attack on Brussels’ Jewish Museum in May 2014, Le Parisien reported, and a third as Salim Benghalem, an Islamic State recruiter sentenced in absentia in France.

The paper said the journalists had described Abou Idriss, who had a Belgian accent, as less violent than Nemmouche, and said he occasionally asked them “scientific questions he expected them to answer”. The Belgian seemed to be “someone of intelligence, composed, capable of adapting rapidly to new situations”, Le Parisien quoted an interior ministry source as saying.