In Brussels Bombing Plot, a Trail of Dots Not Connected

BRUSSELS — The stench of chemicals emanating from the sixth-floor apartment made the owner of the building gag. Other odd happenings at the mostly empty housing block in northern Brussels prompted an anxious resident in the area to alert the police. A taxi driver who picked up three young men at the block smelled a noxious odor leaking from their curiously heavy luggage as he drove them to Brussels Airport.

But not until 7:58 on Tuesday morning did these and other strange and, at least in retrospect, alarming dots come together to form a clear picture of what had been going on for more than two months in the dilapidated but spacious top-floor apartment at 4 Max Roos Street in the Brussels borough of Schaerbeek.

It was then that two homemade bombs — confected from malodorous and highly volatile chemicals in the living room of the apartment — exploded in the check-in area of the airport, followed an hour later by another at a busy subway station. Together, the attacks killed 31 people.

A third bomb was found unexploded at the airport, but the two that were detonated blew holes in the roof and maimed scores of people as they waited to check their baggage.

On Saturday, the airport was still closed, a huge and macabre crime scene instead of a global crossroads and the main entry point to the “capital of Europe,” a city that houses the headquarters of the European Union and NATO.

“Why such repeated dysfunctions?” Marco Van Hees, a member of the Belgian Parliament, asked the interior minister and two other ministers who were summoned on Friday to explain the failure. “We are certainly not dealing here with just a glitch, a little bug, but a deep structural problem.”

That Belgium has a serious problem with jihadist militancy has been clear for years, particularly since January of last year, when the police raided a terrorist hideaway in the eastern town of Verviers and foiled what the authorities said was a major plot. That success, however, masked rather than solved the problem, which exploded with brutal horror in Paris, when militants, many of them Belgians, killed 130 people with guns and with bombs made in the Brussels district of Schaerbeek, the same area that would later house the bomb-making workshop on Max Roos Street.

How was it possible, members of Parliament asked, that two of the suicide bombers in the Brussels attacks, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and his younger brother Khalid, both residents on Max Roos Street since the beginning of the year, had managed to go undetected for so long? And all this despite a record of violent crime in Belgium and, in the case of the older brother, a clear warning from Turkey in June that he was on his way back to Europe after being arrested as a suspected terrorist while on his way to Syria?

And was it really true, the lawmakers demanded, that the authorities had received a precise tip in December about the possible whereabouts of Salah Abdeslam, the only known survivor among the terrorists responsible for theParis attacks, who was finally captured in Brussels on March 18? He was found at the address cited in the December tip-off, which had not been acted on because it had not been passed up the police chain of command.