Explosions at Brussels Airport/Metro stations

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35869254

Hope any Brussels ILXers are okay, please check in on this thread when you can.

Gare du Nord in Paris is being evacuated, not sure if it's because the Eurostar from Brussels arrives there or if there's a separate threat.

er, the Thalys from Brussels, the line whether the attempted shooting happened last year

BBC just reported no deaths from the Metro explosion.

The whole country is being asked to stay in and stop using the phone at the moment

Good luck with that when people will be frantic about their loved ones.

15 people reported dead at the Metro station.

I don't know if this is appropriate or not, but when they captured Abdesalam, the thought flashed through my mind, "Please don't gloat about this", and I'm afraid I thought the Belgians did a bit - whereas Hollande quite pointedly didn't.

28 total deaths in the two attacks, US media say

airport explosion and Metro train station explosion (the latter near the EU offices)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/world/europe/brussels-airport-explosions.html?_r=0

34 dead now, Metro death toll keeps going up.

Tom D: while it seems possible that this is a revenge attack for the capture, it is magical thinking to imagine that gloating had anything to do with it.

this is awful. my sister-in-law texted this morning to say that her extended family all in brussels are okay + safe. tom, i don't think gloating (which i didn't see much if any of) had anything to do with this - but possibly the arrest did (if they knew there was something in the works and they were trying to get a jump on it).

I know it didn't, I just felt a shiver at the time.

guy on bbc mistakenly saying that brussels hasn't experienced any attacks before today. the museum attack now feels like a canary in a coal mine.

If anyone was wondering, (former) ILXor Nath posted on Facebook that's she's made it home safe.

Non-essential staff have been evacuated from the Tihange nuclear plant near Liege at the request of the country's authorities, its French operator Engie says.

Nath is on FB and fine.

Safe and sound. Away from Brussels this week. I don't know how we're supposed to live these days

going to be visiting in july, or at least planning to

Because of the continuing police investigation and the extensive damage to its departures hall, Brussels Airport said in a statement that it was impossible to say when it would reopen for flights.

Mayor, an hour ago:

@YvanMayeur
It is too early to give definite figures, but they will be harsh.

goddammit

#StopIslam is trending on Twitter - mainly because people of low intelligence are offended that #StopIslam is trending on Twitter and keep including the hashtag in their offended tweets.

Thoroughly offended by the 'Why Didn't You Care About Ankara?' today. It's not only that I have to mourn what a terrible tragedy, I get insulted doing so. I just wish some people could just let some other people be, like generally.

while the discretionary nature of our giving a shit, or not, about terrorist outrages depending on where they occur on the planet is certainly something worth thinking about i feel like it's not really a hot-take that we need the day of a tragedy.

if anything im concerned by how predictable and almost normal it feels now to hear about this sort of thing happening in Europe.

i hope i'm wrong but i feel like "why didn't you mourn ankara" comments aren't meant to elicit sympathy, they're meant to erode outrage

Woke up, turned on the TV this morning: Today Show w 31 Killed In Brusels at bottom of screen, Matt Lauer & Savannah Guthrie asking Trump what he would have done to prevent this. Conversation continues in voiceover, with scenes of law enforcement climbing over smoking debris.
Hoping my friend there is okay.
Won't check back 'til tonight, the pressure and compulsion of coverage and "coverage" always spins out all kinds of inaccuracies initially (maybe even more than later, 'til talk radio etc kicks in)

*Brussels*, sorry. They did spell it right at least.

they're now saying that the network behind these attacks is closely connected to the paris-attack folks

CNN is talking to donald trump who is saying he would torture any suspect in the brussels attack "instantly"

can someone do us a favor and pulverize this motherfucker?

poor choice of words in context, but it's awful that CNN is even giving this motherfucker air time right now

Just being presidential, calmin' folks down.

any suspect. instantly.

good god. and people love this shit.

no one knows or is saying yet, amateurist. isis has claimed credit.

The thing about "What about Ankara?" is that I literally did not know about Ankara until someone posted "What about Ankara?", and there's a good chance the person posting that didn't either, because otherwise, why didn't HE post about it, leading it to show up in my facebook feed?

The other thing is that it would be completely unrealistic to expect people to post about every single terror attack in a year, because there are a fucking lot of them. FWIW I never post about any of them, including the ones in Western Europe, unless I have some particularly good reason.

I knew about Ankara but didn't post anything about it because it felt ghoulish

ok, you're off the hook

Isn't the fact that the Ankara bombings were carried out by Kurdish nationalists and not by Islamic extremists significant?

"Third" airport bomber arrested... allegedly.

... not arrested after all.

xxpost There are allegations that Erdogan is blaming ISIS attacks in his country on Kurdish nationalists because it favors him politically to do so.

Would raise the question of why the Kurdish nationalists are admitting having carried them out, though.

As reported by anti-government daily Sözcü, the Ministry of the Interior identified the assailant as Seher Çağla Demir, a Kurdish militant studying at Balıkesir University.[2] Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu initially referred to "very serious evidence" indicating that the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was the perpetrator of the attack. However, just a few days later on 17 March 2016, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) claimed responsibility. The group had already claimed the previous Ankara bombing in February.

I'm aware that this doesn't quite follow the narrative, promulgated by some people in the West, of the Kurds as some sort of saintly race of warrior heroes.

some ppl in the west are dumb. the peshmerga are not the same thing as the PKK.

Erdogan's sleight of hand is blaming the PKK, which is a mainstream(ish) movement with the crimes of TAK, which is a splinter group. Both have bombed Istanbul and Ankara recently but the PKK typically targets the military (and will apologise for civilian deaths, for all that is worth) while TAK targets civilians.

The Peshmerha (mainly Iraq) and PKK don't worth together. The YPG (mainly Syria) and PKK do.

*work together

@ggreenwald
Brussels is 4th straight attack involving brothers & people from same community: in-person planning makes encryption/surveillance irrelevant

TED talk right there

Lol srsly

At least one of the attackers, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, had been deported by Turkey to the Netherlands last year with a clear indication that he was a jihadist.

“Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told a news conference in Ankara on Wednesday, “the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism.”

....Yet the hurdles are as basic as national pride and bureaucratic turf protection, with experts pointing out that even within nations, intelligence-gathering agencies — France alone has some 33 of them — have trouble cooperating.

“Is it not in the nature of intelligence agencies to keep the information for themselves?” asked Jean-Marie Delarue, who until recently headed the French agency that reviews surveillance requests from these intelligence services.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/24/world/europe/as-terrorists-cross-borders-europe-sees-anew-that-its-intelligence-does-not.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Interesting, on Tuesday I was talking to a friend of mine who used to work in counter terrorism for the Met that the French intelligence services were the 'best', far better than the UK, and that the problem with Belgium was specifically that the police and the intelligence services didn't talk to one another.

i have a relative in the French intelligence services who is convinced that my son is going to grow up into a terrorist because we live in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in London

well listen to your related spy, th

"Don't panic, but" a security guy at some (unspecified) Belgian nuclear sites has been found murdered in Charleroi on Thursday and his security/access badge was stolen. It has been deactivated since.

http://www.dhnet.be/actu/faits/un-agent-de-securite-dans-le-nucleaire-tue-a-charleroi-son-badge-d-acces-a-ete-vole-56f5b02a35702a22d5bbf868

update: badge not stolen after all. Well done for getting half a day of extra clicks, stupid news site.

http://www.dhnet.be/actu/faits/un-agent-de-securite-dans-le-nucleaire-tue-a-charleroi-la-piste-terroriste-dementie-par-le-parquet-de-charleroi-56f5b02a35702a22d5bbf868

http://i.imgur.com/mn0TOSt.png

did they shoot this wrong man in the legs?

No, this is about the guy with the hat in the airport pictures, who wasn't the journalist guy they arrested and now let go again. They're still looking for the guy in the hat.

Shot in the legs and still arrested: one of the paris guys who chickened out and hid in Molenbeek for four months, an accomplice who was hiding in the same house, and another guy who was shot at a tram stop after being in contact with a man in france (refused to open his bag, used his 5 year old daughter as a shield).

thank you

Is it at all possible this guy in the hat has nothing to do with the bombing, Ive been wondering? He didnt have a glove on in the image.

Q for the BE folk:
Is Schaerbeek particularly sketchy? I've walked through before and felt pretty safe but not sure if that was just dumb tourist naivety or not.

It's pretty big and varied. Half of it is pretty affluent or getting there. The other half not so much and similar to infamous Molenbeek (ie entirely Moroccan/Turkish). Best to avoid the Gare du nord. Nice art nouveau architecture throughout

I agree regarding the area around Gare du Nord. When I was in Brussels I had some time to kill before getting on the Eurostar so was walking around this area. I went down this one street, Rue d'Aerschot and suddenly wondered why it was so crowded in contrast to the other streets around it. Then I looked to my left and saw the women in the windows. Brussels doesn't have a red light district, it has a red light street.

I am on the planning committee for a conference that is due to be taking place in Brussels at the end of October. The conference organizer sent us all a group email saying should we relocate in the light of the recent events and my answer was a vehement "No! I don't want these people dictating what we do" but guess what? all the other people on the committee have chimed in saying that we should move the conference to London. FFS.

'Man in hat' arrested?