THER EMAIL TO CLOSE BRUSSELS METRO WENT TO WRONG ADRESS
A Parliamentary inquiry into the March 2016 bombing in Belgium heard new information about the string of terror attacks.
Belgian soldiers patrol Brussels after the March attacks — REUTERS
Sixteen people were killed when a terrorist detonated a suicide vest
in Brussels’ Maelbeek station in March. Now, new information shows an
email order to evacuate the station, sent before the bomb went off, was
sent to the wrong address.
After a pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Brussels airport on the morning of March 22, 2016, the city remained on high alert, worried about the possibility of a second bombing. Nearly an hour after the first explosion, an email went out ordering the closure of train stations. A few moments later, a bomb detonated at the Maelbeek metro station, bringing the day’s death toll to 32. The closure email went to the personal email address, instead of the work address, of the man responsible.
At a parliamentary inquiry into the bombings this week, officials learned that interruptions in phone service following the airport attacks forced authorities to rely on other methods to send alerts after the airport bomb. According to the Wall Street Journal, this included emails, “iPad messages,” and WhatsApp texts. A federal alert was issued at 8:50 a.m. with an order to close metro stations, but the company that runs the metro has said it never received it.
At 9:07 a.m., federal police sent Jo Decuyper, chief of railway police in the region, an email ordering Brussels’ metro network to be shut down. But Decuyper didn’t see that email until a day later, because it was sent to his personal account.
Decuyper didn’t think it would have made a difference if he had seen the email in time—the bomber was already in the subway car by that point, and detonated his vest a few minutes after the email was sent.
This error aside, the committee also heard that—due to a combination of bad organization among the ISIS-linked terrorists who carried out the attacks and good policing—the attacks were ultimately far less deadly than they could have been.
After a pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Brussels airport on the morning of March 22, 2016, the city remained on high alert, worried about the possibility of a second bombing. Nearly an hour after the first explosion, an email went out ordering the closure of train stations. A few moments later, a bomb detonated at the Maelbeek metro station, bringing the day’s death toll to 32. The closure email went to the personal email address, instead of the work address, of the man responsible.
At a parliamentary inquiry into the bombings this week, officials learned that interruptions in phone service following the airport attacks forced authorities to rely on other methods to send alerts after the airport bomb. According to the Wall Street Journal, this included emails, “iPad messages,” and WhatsApp texts. A federal alert was issued at 8:50 a.m. with an order to close metro stations, but the company that runs the metro has said it never received it.
At 9:07 a.m., federal police sent Jo Decuyper, chief of railway police in the region, an email ordering Brussels’ metro network to be shut down. But Decuyper didn’t see that email until a day later, because it was sent to his personal account.
Decuyper didn’t think it would have made a difference if he had seen the email in time—the bomber was already in the subway car by that point, and detonated his vest a few minutes after the email was sent.
This error aside, the committee also heard that—due to a combination of bad organization among the ISIS-linked terrorists who carried out the attacks and good policing—the attacks were ultimately far less deadly than they could have been.
Hakuna maoni