Free Republic

It’s no surprise that a pair of brothers was among the suspects believed to have carried out the deadly attacks in Brussels Tuesday, terror experts say. This is hardly the first time that brothers have been part of such a plot. In addition to the El-Bakraoui brothers -- Khalid and Ibrahim -- who died in Tuesday's suicide bombings, other sets of brothers were involved in the November terror attacks in Paris, the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris in January 2015, the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and even in the Sept. 11 attacks, where three sets of brothers were among...

The brothers fit what European anti-terrorism investigators call a disturbing but now-familiar profile. They were young Belgian nationals of Moroccan descent, both with extensive criminal records involving violent crime and guns. But neither had been previously linked to terrorism, Belgium's chief prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, said Wednesday at a news conference here. The siblings — Brahim and Khalid El Bakraoui — were publicly identified Wednesday as two of the suicide bombers in attacks at an airport and on a metro train Tuesday that left 31 people dead and 260 injured, the latest terrorist strikes to stun a continent reeling from...

BRUSSELS — The bomb attacks in Belgium offer new evidence of its security forces’ shortcomings in monitoring violent Islamist radicals, a failure that has allowed this country at the heart of Europe to become an incubator of terror. One glaring example: Belgian authorities knew that at least one of the two siblings accused of blowing themselves up in Tuesday’s attacks — Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29 — had entered Turkey with the apparent intent of joining Islamist militants in Syria, according to a senior Turkish security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Bakraoui...

Belgian brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui have today been named as the two airport suicide bombers who murdered 14 people eight days after escaping a shoot-out with police in Brussels. The third member of the bombing squad - now known as the 'Man in White' - was named as expert bombmaker Najim Laachraoui, who is still on the run after leaving a suitcase packed with explosives and calmly leaving the terminal moments before the massacre at 8am yesterday. Just 79 minutes later a suicide bomber detonated his vest on a Brussels Metro train at Maelbeek station killing 20 people....