Turkey’s official Anadolu Agency said that Ibrahim el-Bakroui, one of the two brothers whose suicide attack at Brussels Zaventem airport on Tuesday killed some 32 people and wounded 300, was arrested in Turkey’s southeastern Gaziantep province last year on suspicions of being a foreign militant.
Without naming el-Bakraoui, Erdogan said at a news conference in Ankara that he had been deported to Belgium but authorities had failed to confirm the suspect’s jihadi links.
"One of the Brussels attackers was detained in Gaziantep and then deported," Erdogan told reporters.
"Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter, the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism," he told reporters alongside visiting Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.
News reports later said that an official in the president’s office had clarified Erdogan statement, saying El-Bakraoui had been deported to the Netherlands in July, not Belgium.
He confirmed that Turkey had warned both Belgium and the Netherlands that suspect was a "foreign terrorist fighter.”
The official said El-Bakraoui had been allowed to go free in The Netherlands because Belgian authorities had not been able to establish any ties to terrorism.
