Brussels attacks: Chinks in Belgian armour

Brussels: Tuesday’s explosions, which killed at least 30 people at the main Brussels airport and an underground rail station, came just days after Belgium’s security services caught the last surviving suspect in November’s attacks on Paris. It is still too early to say whether Tuesday’s attacks were directly linked to Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam’s capture. U.S. officials believe they may have been already in the works before his arrest, and was not highly sophisticated or the type of attack that required a huge amount of ingenuity.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Charles Michel, who had locked down the capital for days in November after the Paris attacks, warned on Sunday of “a real threat”.

U.S. government sources said that, while the U.S. and Belgium had believed that another attack after Paris was highly likely, they did not have hard Intelligence about where or when such an attack would occur.

Reviving arguments over Belgian policies in the wake of the Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed in an operation apparently organised from Brussels, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin spoke of “naivete” on the part of “certain leaders” in holding back from security crackdowns on Muslim communities. A lawmaker from Michel’s party, Didier Ducarme, hit back on French TV. He said comments like Sapin’s “are starting to seriously irritate me” and noted it was a France-based gunman who killed four at Brussels’ Jewish Museum in 2014.

To follow a single suspect around 24 hours a day without being detected, security agencies need crews of as many as 36 officers, U.S. and European officials estimate, meaning even well-staffed agencies such as Britain’s MI5 can only closely follow a limited number of suspects at any particular time.

According to Alain Winants, head of the Belgian intelligence service from 2006 until 2014, Belgium was one of the last places in Europe to obtain modern techniques to gather information, such as telephone taps.

The patchwork country divided between French- and Dutch-speakers has a bureaucracy that hinders the sharing of information. That allows militants to hide below the radar in a way they cannot in the much more centralised Netherlands, as well as slowing the passing of new laws to rein in the preaching of hate in mosques and a roaring trade in illegal weapons.