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Itongadol.- A prime suspect in Tuesday\’s Brussels bombings, Najim Laachraoui, was arrested on Wednesday in the city\’s Anderlecht district, Belgian newspaper DH said on its website.
Police were hunting him as a man seen with suspected suicide bombers at Brussels airport.
Earlier Wednesday, Belgian media said the two men who blew themselves up at Brussels airport on Tuesday were brothers known to the police and Laachraoui, a known Paris attacks suspect.
The suicide bombers were brothers named as Khalid and Brahim El Bakraoui.
Federal prosecutors declined to comment, but said they would provide information in the course of the morning.
Laachraoui\’s DNA had been found in houses used by the Paris attackers last year, prosecutors said on Monday, adding that he had traveled to Hungary in September with Paris attacks prime suspect Salah Abdeslam.
Captured on a security camera photograph at Brussels Airport on Tuesday morning beside the El Bakraoui brothers, Laachraoui did not detonate a bomb. A bomb was subsequently destroyed in a controlled explosion.
Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, had rented under a false name the flat in the Forest borough of the Belgian capital where police killed a gunman in a raid last week, RTBF said.
Belgian newspaper DH said the Bakraoui brothers may have fled the flat in Forest after last week\’s shootout.
In the raid, investigators found an Islamic State flag, an assault rifle, detonators and a fingerprint of Abdeslam, who was arrested three days later.
Both brothers have criminal records, but have not been linked by the police to Islamist militants until now, RTBF said.
Brahim El Bakraoui, 30, was convicted in October 2010 for firing a Kalashnikov assault rifle at police and wounding an officer after a robbery in Brussels earlier that year. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In 2011, his brother Khalid was given a sentence of five years for car jacking.
The blasts on Tuesday claimed by the Syrian-based militants four days after the arrest in Brussels of a prime suspect in November\’s Paris attacks, sent shockwaves across Europe and around the world, with authorities racing to review security at airports and transit systems, and drawing an outpouring of solidarity.
"We can and we will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world," said US President Barack Obama. Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination to succeed Obama in November\’s election, suggested suspects could be tortured to avert such attacks.
Local media said authorities had followed a tip from a taxi driver who believed he may have driven the bombers to the airport.
Investigators said they were focusing on a man in a hat who was caught on CCTV pushing a laden baggage trolley at the airport with two others they believed were the bombers. An unused explosive device was later found at the airport and a man was seen running away from the terminal after the explosions.
Security experts believed the blasts, which killed about 20 on a metro train running through the area that houses European Union institutions, were probably in preparation before Friday\’s arrest of Abdeslam, 26, for a key role in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks.
He was caught and has been speaking to investigators after a shootout at an apartment in the south of the city a week ago, after which another Islamic State flag and explosives were found. It was unclear whether he had knowledge of the new attack or whether accomplices may have feared police were closing in.
Islamic State said in a statement that "caliphate soldiers, strapped with suicide vests and carrying explosive devices and machineguns" struck Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station.
It was not clear, however, that the attackers used vests. The suspects were photographed pushing bags on trolleys, and witnesses said many of the airport dead and wounded were hit mostly in the legs, possibly indicating blasts at floor level.