Brussels Bombings Tied to Paris Attacks; Friends and Families Search for Loved Ones; Politics in Wake of Brussels Attacks; Intel Suggests Brussels Attack Part of Wider Plot; Details Emerge about Brussels Attacks Victims.
MAX FOSTER, CNN HOST: Not just in Belgium, but across the continent ISIS operatives may have picked out potential targets. Right now, a massive manhunt is under way for the man in white, seen in the airport surveillance photo from Tuesday. Authorities says they're not sure who he is or how many others may be involved in planning the attacks. Turkish officials, though, say one of the airport bombers, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, was detained in Turkey last summer. They say they notified Belgian authorities, who said they couldn't link him to terrorism. Bakraoui was then sent to the Netherlands and eventually let go. CNN correspondents are covering all of the angles of the story from several locations around Brussels. In just a moment, we'll get to Atika Shubert's report on the military hospital working to identify attack victims. But we begin with CNN's Phil Black, who's reporting on how authorities are connecting the Brussels bombers to each other and onwards to the Paris attacks back in November.</s>PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The day after the bombings, the Belgian capital remains on high alert, after the attacks which brought death and destruction to the heart of Europe. These are the three men who carried out the attack on Brussels airport. Prosecutors have said two suicide bombers died at the scene. One confirmed as Ibrahim el Bakraoui. Belgian investigators now say they believe the second bomber was Najim Laachraoui, a man wanted for his role in the Paris attacks. The pair detonated two bombs inside the departure hall at Brussels airport, killing at least 10 people. One of the attackers had left behind a third bomb; containing large amounts of unstable explosives, it detonated moments after the bomb squad arrived.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We saw doors flying, glass, ceiling coming down.</s>BLACK (voice-over): Across town, in the center of the city, a bomb exploded on a metro train. Investigators believe the brother of airport brother Ibrahim, Khalid El Bakraoui, detonated the device. Underground terror for morning travelers, killing many, injuring hundreds. Survivors desperately fleeing through the devastation and the dark.</s>BRIAN CARROLL, WITNESS: I felt an explosion. And the train stopped in its tracks. The lights went out. The power went out. Everyone dropped to the ground. They were screaming.</s>BLACK (voice-over): Normally busy, Belgium's streets, surrounded by landmarks of the E.U., transformed into hospitals rather than the home of European politics. The first victim to be identified, Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz, killed during the attack at the airport. Originally from Peru, Tapia Ruiz had lived in Belgium for six years. She was at the airport with her husband and twin 3-year-old daughters. As families begin to mourn, hand in hand, the people of Brussels remembered, lighting candles and laying flowers for those who lost their lives -- Phil Black, CNN, Brussels.</s>FOSTER: A valuable source of information for investigators has been the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek. A taxi driver led police to the area after recognizing the airport bombing suspects as passengers that he had picked up. Fred Pleitgen reports on what police found there.</s>FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: According to the authorities, an apartment in this building, in the district of Schaerbeek was used as the main bombmaking factories both for the attacks on the Brussels airport and the one on the metro as well. The police say that they have recovered some 15 kilograms or almost 40 pounds of the explosive TATP, as well as chemicals, screws, which of course are used to mix into explosive devices to make them even more deadly, and also an ISIS flag inside one of the apartments in that building. Now we were able to speak to someone who says that he lived on the same floor as the alleged attackers. And he says, he barely saw them around.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I've never seen them except one time. I came across one that was skinny. I said hello. And I greeted him, "Bonjour." But he didn't respond. And I never saw them again. And I feel scared.</s>PLEITGEN (voice-over): The raid here in Schaerbeek lasted several hours. It involved a lot of police officers and also police helicopters, with what appeared to be police snipers, glancing through an open door of the helicopter and repeatedly pointing their rifles. Now afterwards, forensic teams worked pretty much the entire night. They recovered a lot of things from this apartment building. But they also recovered something in the garbage can outside: a laptop that appeared to contain something like the will of one of the attackers, where he was apparently saying that he felt that the police was onto him and that he felt that if they did not come through with this plot quickly, that maybe they would wind up going to jail just like Salah Abdeslam.</s>PLEITGEN (voice-over): Authorities fear that people involved in both the Brussels attack and the Paris attack could still be at large and could still pose a threat to society here in Belgium and possibly in other places in Europe. But they also hope that at least some of the things that they recovered from this apartment complex here in Schaerbeek could help them track down some of those people and bring them to justice -- Fred Pleitgen, CNN, Brussels, Belgium.</s>FOSTER: The attacks here in Brussels truly were international with victims of 40 different nationalities. CNN's senior international correspondent Atika Shubert joins me with more on that. And, sadly, so many of them are still unidentified and there are families out there, wondering where on Earth they are.</s>ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, exactly. Of the 31 people killed, only three have been identified so far. And there are also a number of wounded that have not been identified, at least four, because they are in comas and they have not been to have any ID documents on them. So it is a struggle for hospitals at this point to try an figure out -- to identify a number of the victims. And it was a struggle on that day. We actually spoke to a hotel manager who was closest to the metro station. He said they brought out their first aid kits; they had a medic in the hospital to help. But they were quickly overwhelmed. The Red Cross came in and said, listen, can we turn your hotel lobby into a triage center? And so they took out all the sofas; they brought in hospital beds. And immediately it became an emergency clinic. Extraordinary scenes of people trying to help in whichever way they can. But now in aftermath, the difficulty is identifying the victims -- Max.</s>FOSTER: And in terms of how the hospitals responded, I gather at least one positive coming out of all of this, was that that emergency response did work pretty well. And the injured did get to hospitals in good time.</s>SHUBERT: Yes, we spoke to a number of doctors and hospital staff, who said fortunately they had actually been preparing for not an event like this but natural disaster, catastrophe. And so they had actually, in the particular hospital we visited, had plans to convert their reception area into an emergency room and they just had no idea that they would be using it for an attack like this.</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): The day after twin terror attacks shattered the Belgian city of Brussels, the hospitals are still coping with the influx of victims.</s>SHUBERT: We're standing outside of the Royal Military Hospital here in Brussels. And this is where at least 80 of the victims from the airport blast were brought to, suffering from multiple burns and shrapnel wounds.</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): The entrance was transformed into an emergency ward designed to be used in war or natural disaster. Many now have been transferred to the specialized burns unit, though the hospital is also working with investigators to identify the dead. Jan Vaes was among the first medics at the airport.</s>SHUBERT: What was the first thing that you saw when you got to the scene?</s>JAN VAES, BELGIAN DEFENCE MEDIC: Gas. Dust, gas, people shouting, crying. All people crossing, help here, over here.</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): For 20 years, he has served as a military medic in places like Afghanistan. But he has never seen anything like this, a bomb that investigators believe was packed with nails and bolts.</s>VAES: I saw a lot of people with holes in their body. And the people were hit by pieces of</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): Outside the hospital, soldiers stand guard. The Belgian flag flies at half-staff.</s>SHUBERT: Do you also have a picture of your girlfriend?</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): Twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Selamani (ph) is searching for his girlfriend, 24-year-old Sabrina Esmail Fazal (ph). They have a 1-year-old son.</s>SHUBERT: What kind of a person is she?</s>JONATHAN SELAMANI (PH): She's very shy. She's short. And she's forte.</s>SHUBERT: Strong.</s>SELAMANI (PH): Strong, yes.</s>SHUBERT: She's a strong person.</s>SELAMANI (PH): Yes, she's a strong person. Yes.</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): Jonathan has set up a Facebook page for information. He says she was studying to be a botanist and on her way to school when the bomb ripped through the train car. Her last iPhone location was near the metro station.</s>SHUBERT: Are you worried that maybe she's been injured and may be unconscious?</s>SELAMANI (PH): I don't think. I don't want to think about it.</s>SHUBERT (voice-over): At hospitals across Brussels, the heartbreaking search for answers continues.</s>SHUBERT: Now the difficulty of course for those families --</s>SHUBERT: -- is going from hospital-to-hospital looking for information they can get. But it's still likely to be days before they get any information at all -- Max.</s>FOSTER: And so frustration building up, I gather, Atika, as well amongst families, not just people around Brussels, that perhaps the authorities knew, failed in terms of their security measures. The extent that we knew that there was a red notice, an Interpol red notice out for one of the suicide bombers. And yet the authorities here say all of the information they have was that he was linked to petty crime or non-terrorism related crime. What do we know about that? And was there a failure in your opinion?</s>SHUBERT: I think it's very clear that there are now a number of red flags that, had they been followed up, may have at least led them to the discovery of this wider terror network. You point out that Khalid El Bakraoui was somebody who had an Interpol red notice. And when you see a petty crime, keep in mind that petty crime was a robbery in which Kalashnikovs or AK-47s were used to shoot at police. So very heavy weaponry we're talking about here. He was wanted by Interpol to serve a criminal sentence. We also know that his brother, Ibrahim El Bakraoui, was caught by Turkey in Gaziantep, which is right on the border with Syria. He was deported to the Netherlands. And Belgian authorities were notified. But again, the brothers were listed as being involved with criminal activities, not terror activities. So a lot of people asking questions as to whether the Belgian authorities should have been following this up more closely, Having said that, keep in mind that more than hundreds, possibly up to 500 fighters have gone from Belgium to Syria and Iraq to fight with groups like ISIS. Now that is a very large group of people to try and monitor. It requires many agents, a lot of capacity. And it seems to really have overwhelmed Belgian security forces that they didn't have the resources or the manpower to monitor all of these people.</s>FOSTER: It's a huge pressure on all the authorities involved. Thank you, Atika. Next on CNN, though, we're going to have a look at how the Brussels attacks abruptly changed the agenda of the U.S. presidential race. Stay with us for details on that.