Brothers at Center of Brussels Bombing Now Revealed to Have Been Behind Surveillance Operation Against Brussels Nuclear Official

Last month, I mentioned that there was a report of a nuclear official in Brussels being spied upon by jihadists.

From Le Figaro (my translation):

During a raid in Belgium in the middle of the investigation into the attacks of 13 November, police discovered a video [surveillance] of a high official of the nuclear industry, filmed without his knowledge at his home over a period of "around twelve hours."

It's a highly troubling discovery which the investigators charged with looking into the "Belgian Brotherhood," suspected of masterminding the attacks that had killed 130 in Paris and Saint-Denis last November 13, have made.

During a raid on the home of a suspect, they got their hands on a video in which appears a top official of the Belgian nuclear industry...

The Belgian daily (which broke the story) is going, however, beyond these revelations. The video, lasting "a dozen or so hours," would show a fixed angle shot [of] "the front door of a house in Flanders." According to the same source, the owner of the house, who appears several times in the images coming and going from his house, is none other than the "director of the research program of the nuclear development in Belgium."

Now it is revealed that the persons responsible for this surveillance video were none other than Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui, the two brothers at the center of the Brussels bombing.

It seems likely the idea was to kidnap a member of the official's family, or blackmail him, so as to force him to give up either nuclear information or nuclear waste that could be used in a dirty bomb.

By the Way: France is debating whether or not to impose life in prison without the possibility of parole (which they call "perpetuite reele," or being jailed in perpetuity, for realsies), which sounds like a no-brainer (though execution is preferable), but they can't quite do that, because the European Union demands that its member states impose a sentence of no more than 30 years, after which is is demanded a judge determine if the prisoner still constitutes a threat. Thus, the EU, for reasons I don't quite understand, deigns to set the rules of law enforcement for member states, and further requires that even mass murderers be eligible for parole after 30 years.

The right demands the measure; the socialist president Hollande's people support it, probably because they must (or else face a huge electoral drubbing), but many socialists not in the government oppose even this, calling life imprisonment for mas murdering terrorists "a slow death," and apparently meaning that to be a bad thing.

Ah, Of Course: Belgium only questioned Saleh Abdeslam -- suspected of having helped plot the Brussels bombing -- for one hour after his capture.

Belgian law enforcement officials questioned terror suspect Salah Abdeslam for about one hour between the time of his arrest Friday and the Brussels attacks Tuesday, according to Abdeslam’s attorney and two sources familiar with the investigation.

The session Saturday at a prison in Bruges yielded no information about the imminent threat because the prosecutors started chronologically and focused first on Abdeslam’s involvement in last November’s Paris terror attacks, the sources said.

A source says he "seemed very tired" during the questioning because he had been operated on the night before. (He had been shot in the leg before his capture.)

So I guess that's why he gets the soft touch.

posted by Ace at 01:23 PM

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