Soldiers on Sunday patrolled Grand-Place, near Place de la Bourse, an area of Brussels that is an unofficial shrine to victims of last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.
By ANDREW HIGGINS and KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA
MARCH 28, 2016
BRUSSELS — A noisy citizen journalist who reveled in verbal and physical fights in public spaces, Fayçal Cheffou never quite fit the profile of a furtive underground operative for the Islamic State. Yet that was the role assigned to him when the Belgian authorities announced that he had been charged with terrorism and the Belgian news media identified him as the “third bomber” at Brussels Airport in last Tuesday’s attacks.
Mr. Cheffou’s arrest last week, curiously easy as he was picked up right outside the federal prosecutor’s office, signaled a big break for a Belgian security apparatus assailed by complaints that it had missed vital clues before the terrorist assault at the airport and a subway station.
Now it looks as if the police got the wrong man, or at least lacked enough evidence to hold him. Mr. Cheffou was released on Monday.
Vilified as “an extremist jihadi horror” early on Monday by a senior Belgian official, Mr. Cheffou was freed just a few hours later with the authorities acknowledging that the evidence against a man they had charged with terrorism and murder was not as strong as they had thought. This suggested that Mr. Cheffou had been mistakenly identified by a witness as the bomber in a dark hat and white coat in an airport surveillance photo.
On Monday, the Belgian police again asked for help identifying that bomber, releasing for the first time surveillance video showing him and the two other attackers slowly pushing luggage carts through the airport with large black bags on them.
To add to the confusion, Eric Van der Sijpt, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said Monday that the charges against Mr. Cheffou remained for the moment.
“We’re not saying that he’s innocent. That we do not do,” Mr. Van der Sijpt said in telephone interview. “It’s that he’s no longer needed in prison. But there are two different things. Preventative custody has nothing to do with the actual investigations or the charges brought.”
He added that the prosecutor would decide at the end of the investigation whether to prosecute Mr. Cheffou and that only then would the status of the charges against him be decided.
In a separate statement, the prosecutor’s office said Monday that three men detained in and around Brussels on Sunday had been charged with participating in the activities of a terrorist group. It was not clear if they were connected to the attacks last Tuesday.
The disarray over Mr. Cheffou followed a catalog of mishaps and errors that last week prompted Belgium’s ministers of justice and the interior to offer their resignations — they were asked to stay on — and led to angry questioning of the government during a parliamentary hearing on Belgium’s response to terrorism.
Reflecting public outrage over mounting evidence that the authorities had ignored or misinterpreted signals that might have prevented the attacks, Le Soir, a leading French-language Belgian newspaper, last week splashed a damning indictment of the security apparatus across its front page: “Serious mistakes.” La Capitale, another newspaper, was blunter still: “Chaos,” its front page screamed.
Since then, dismay has only increased, with rival French- and Dutch-speaking politicians trading accusations on Monday over who was responsible for allowing several hundred hooligans to storm a makeshift shrine to the victims of the terrorist attacks in front of the old Brussels stock exchange on Sunday. The French speakers denounced the hooligans, who had assembled on Saturday in the town of Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, as Dutch-speaking fascists.
Then, just as the hooligan furor was reaching its peak, the federal prosecutor’s office announced that Mr. Cheffou, named only as Fayçal C. in official statements, had been released. And with that the best hope so far of piecing together the terrorist plot and perhaps identifying other plots in the works had suddenly evaporated. The three other people so far identified as directly involved in last week’s attacks — two brothers, Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui, and the suspected bomb-maker, Najim Laachraoui — are all dead.
“The evidence that had led to the arrest of the man named Fayçal C. was not substantiated by the evolution of the ongoing investigation,” Thierry Werts, another spokesman for the federal prosecutor, said in a statement. “Consequently, he has been freed by the investigative judge.”
Belgians writing on Twitter in Dutch expressed outrage over the latest turn of events. “We got him but it was the wrong guy #painful,” said one. Another fumed: “Cheffou the new hero of the Left on Twitter. I’m going to be sick.” Others, mostly writing in French, pilloried the authorities for having arrested Mr. Cheffou in the first place.
Mr. Cheffou had been picked out of a photographic lineup by a cabdriver who shuttled three men to Brussels Airport, where two of them — Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Mr. Laachraoui — blew themselves up at 7:58 a.m. last Tuesday. Mr. Bakraoui’s younger brother, Khalid, blew himself up at 9:11 a.m. at the Maelbeek subway station.
The death toll from the attacks rose on Monday to 35, as the authorities reported that four victims who had been hospitalized died from their injuries. The toll, which was reported by the Belgian health minister, Maggie De Block, did not include the three suicide
bombers.
In an interview on Sunday, Yvan Mayeur, the mayor of the City of Brussels, the central borough of the 19 municipalities that make up the Belgian capital, said that the taxi driver had identified Mr. Cheffou in a police photo lineup, but that the authorities were still waiting for DNA confirmation that he was the bomber.
Mr. Mayeur added that he did not know whether Mr. Cheffou had been involved in terrorism, but did know him to be a local troublemaker who had repeatedly disrupted a camp of refugees in Parc Maximilien, near the Gare du Nord railway station.
Mr. Cheffou, he said, often harangued and got into fights with volunteers from Belgian nongovernmental organizations, denouncing them for not being Muslims and urging migrants in their care to rebel.
“He tried to get the refugees to turn against NGOs because they were ‘nonbelievers,’ ” Mr. Mayeur recalled.
In September, after prosecutors declined to intervene, the mayor issued a municipal order barring Mr. Cheffou from the migrant encampment, which was later shut down.
His written order accused Mr. Cheffou of wreaking havoc at the camp, alleging that four of his underlings had tried in September to force a 17-year-old female migrant to spend the night with “the chief.” She escaped with help from volunteers. It also said he had denounced Belgian workers at the camp as being infidels, collaborators with the state and, in one case, in the pay of Israel.
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