BRUSSELS — The bomb maker, the transporter, the landlord and the cipher. The four men slipped away after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, and all but one reappeared as key figures in the Islamic State cell that went on to attack Brussels.
Two are dead, one is captured, and the fate of the fourth remains a mystery.
Who lives and who dies in an attack can provide crucial clues to how terrorist cells are structured, demonstrating who is considered disposable and who is crucial for the next job. That status can be fleeting, as the two attacks show that someone considered vital in one operation may be sacrificed in another.
Some of the figures in the Paris plot had become “cannon fodder” by the time of the Brussels attacks, said Nicolas Henin, a journalist held hostage by the Islamic State for 10 months.
“Once they had performed their services in Paris, they were considered expendable,” he wrote. “That is how (the Islamic State group) works in terms of human resources.”
The Bomb Maker
With a newly minted degree in mechanical engineering, Najim Laachraoui left for Syria in February 2013 — a relatively early departure in the wave of Belgians who have traveled to fight with the extremists.
He returned home 2½ years later as an expert in urban explosives, bearing a fake Belgian ID and an alias: Soufiane Kayal.
Laachraoui’s job was to manufacture the TATP explosives and the suicide vests. His DNA was found on one of the vests that detonated inside the Bataclan concert hall as well as one that blew up outside France’s national stadium. The man himself was nowhere to be found.
Thirteen days later, that same DNA was found in a safe house in the Belgian town of Auvelais, and authorities soon linked the name Kayal to another apartment in nearby Charleroi, where some of the November attackers had stayed before traveling convoy-style to Paris. They didn’t, however, connect the alias to Laachraoui.
Authorities also found bomb-making materials in an apartment in the Brussels suburb of Schaerbeek — enough TATP for three massive suitcase bombs, 15 to 20 kilograms each, experts say.
On Tuesday, Laachraoui was one of three men who wheeled suitcases packed with explosives into the departures hall of Brussels Airport.
Why Laachraoui had gone from bomb maker to suicide bomber remains unclear.
“It’s strange,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who is now with the Soufan Group security firm. “They don’t have a shortage of people that are willing to become a walking bomb, but there’s always a shortage of talent.”
The Transporter
Salah Abdeslam drove thousands of miles across Europe over months, collecting accomplices, scouting locations and buying equipment. He rented apartments and cars and, on the night of Nov. 11, drove toward Paris with another onetime petty criminal and boyhood friend, Mohamed Abrini.
Abdeslam ditched the car in northern Paris and is believed to have discarded his unexploded suicide vest south of the city.
“He has a personality that is more complex than the terrorist automaton who is just there to blow himself up,” Marc Trevidic, France’s former anti-terrorist judge, told BFM television. “Not fragile, but complex.”
Abdeslam was flushed out on March 15, when police went to search what they thought was a vacant apartment in the Forest neighborhood of Brussels and instead were sprayed with gunfire. Abdeslam escaped.
By March 18, police had traced Abdeslam to another hideout — this time just around the corner from his childhood home in Molenbeek. He was shot in the leg as he tried to escape yet again. In the four days between his capture and the blasts that shook Brussels, he made no mention of a new plot afoot, nor did he explain his role in the Paris attacks, beyond what Belgian and French media described as blanket denials of responsibility or close ties to the attackers.
The Landlord
Khalid El Bakraoui was another man with an alias and a warrant out for his arrest. He and his brother Ibrahim were known criminals, bank robbers and car thieves with a string of convictions between them.
Interpol issued an international warrant for his arrest in December — soon after it was discovered he had rented the Charleroi apartment that served as a departure point for some of the Paris killers.
It took investigators until Dec. 9 to track down that safe house — enough time that El Bakraoui was again entrusted with scouting locations for the network’s growing number of accomplices and possibly for a new attack.
It was El Bakraoui who rented the Forest safe house and was seen leaving the Schaerbeek apartment that served as the explosives warehouse for Tuesday’s attacks.
By Wednesday, the brothers were dead; Khalid in the Maelbeek metro station, his brother at the airport.
The Cipher
Mohamed Abrini, a 31-year-old Belgian petty criminal and boyhood friend of the Abdeslams, is believed to have traveled early last summer to Syria, a short trip to the country where his younger brother died in 2014 in the Islamic State’s notorious Francophone brigade.
Abrini’s role in the subsequent weeks and months while the Paris attackers were coming together has never been clarified. He has been on the run since the Nov. 13 attacks but never resurfaced after the emergence of the surveillance video placing him in the convoy with the attackers headed to Paris.
He is the last identified suspect still at large from the November attacks.
Other suspects
But there are suspects at large from the Brussels attacks: the man in the hat who accompanied the airport attackers and another man who led Khalid into the subway and drove a gray Audi that was spotted by surveillance cameras, according to a European security official, who was not permitted to speak publicly about the footage. Belgian media reported that the man missing from the airport was among those arrested Friday — a new name in a web that seems to expand by the day.
“What is interesting here is the presence of watchmen — the guy in white seen next to the two bombers at the airport and the driver of the bomber who attacked the subway line,” said the official. He said he believed it was significant that no one with operational links and knowledge of the chain of command was thought to be alive.
