Brussels bomber ‘identified as jailer of foreign Isis hostages’

One of the two suicide bombers who killed 16 people at Brussels’ Zaventem airport last month has been identified as a former Islamic State prison guard in Syria.

French journalists seized in Syria by the terror group in 2013 have identified Najim Laachraoui, the presumed bomb-maker for both the Brussels attacks and those carried out in Paris in November last year, as one of the captors who held them hostage for 10 months, their lawyer said.
“I can confirm that he was the jailer of my clients,” said Marie-Laure Ingouf, a lawyer for two of the four journalists who were freed in April 2014, confirming French media reports. Ingouf said one of her clients, Nicolas Hénin, had “formally identified” the bomber.
Laachraoui, a 24-year-old Belgian national, blew himself up at the airport on 22 March with Ibrahim El Bakraoui, whose brother Khalid detonated another suicide bomb at the Maelbeek metro station shortly afterwards, killing a further 16 people.