The Brussels attacker was arrested in Turkey and handed over to the Belgian authorities last year, but they released him, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday.
Speaking to reporters about the attacks, Erdogan said: “One of the attackers of the Brussels attacks was arrested in June 2015 in [the Turkish city of] Gaziantep and deported to Belgium on July 14, 2015, after information supplied by the Belgium embassy.”
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“Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter, Belgium could not establish any links with terrorism.”
A senior Turkish official told AFP that one of the suicide attackers in Brussels was deported from Turkey to Belgium in 2015 and was released there. He named him as Ibrahim El-Bakraoui. Belgian authorities confirmed that he was one of the suicide bombers.