The Slatest

Brussels Police Arrest Six Suspects in Nighttime Raids

Police take part in an operation in Schaerbeek-Schaarbeek, Brussels, late on Thursday. Six people were arrested that day in a series of police operations in the Belgian capital.

Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP/Getty Images

Brussels police continue to investigate this week’s twin terror attacks at the city’s airport and in its subway system, as well as search for at least one suspect who they believe was directly involved in carrying out the deadly attacks. On Thursday, officials announced that they’d made a half-dozen arrests after a series of nighttime raids across the city, though details were sparse, via the Washington Post:

Belgian authorities have been scrambling to track down suspects who remain at large as officials confront accusations that they had failed to disrupt the plot that claimed dozens of lives this week. It was not clear whether the six participated in the attacks, Belgian authorities said, nor is it known yet how many people were involved as it became clearer that the Brussels attacks had links to the November massacres in Paris.

Earlier Thursday, top Belgian officials for the first time publicly acknowledged a series of miscommunications and other errors that occurred prior to Tuesday’s suicide bombings—including a failure to act on a tip from the Turkish government about one of the suspected bombers, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, who was arrested in Turkey last year on suspicion of terrorist activity. El-Bakraoui and his brother, Khalid, had also been wanted since December in connection with last year’s Paris attacks that killed 130. Taken together, those disclosures “amounted to the first high-level acknowledgment that European officials could have done more to avert the bombings,” according to the New York Times. The Belgian ministers of justice and interior both offered to resign their posts as a result of the intelligence failures, but the prime minister rejected those offers.

In France, meanwhile, authorities announced that they had arrested a man they claimed was in “an advanced stage” of planning an attack on French soil. That alleged plot, though, had no apparent link to Tuesday’s attacks.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the Brussels terror attacks.