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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Possible 2nd Bomber; Brussels Terrorists Linked; Injured at Military Hospitals; Identifying Victims. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired March 24, 2016 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


[12:00:30] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Another look at the horror that unfolded inside the Brussels airport. Bodies buried underneath the ruble.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, ANCHOR, CNN'S "NEW DAY": Family members and friends of the missing in the Brussels terror attack still hold on to hope that their loved ones will be found.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You live through those scenarios, you think about those, but you can never imagine that something like this would happen to your own daughter, your own family. And it's a - it's horrible beyond imagination.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The airport bomber still on the run.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, ANCHOR, CNN'S "NEW DAY": The manhunt here now expanding.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Word of another attacker involved in the Brussels bombings. A senior Belgian security source tells CNN, a second unidentified person being sought in the blast in Brussels metro system.

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: This is a race against time to prevent another terrorist attack.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. And welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

The breaking news this hour, brand-new fears that two bombers may be on the loose right now after bombs ripped part an airport and subway station in Brussels. And ISIS leaders in Syria, in Syria, may have played a role in this.

The devastating blast on the subway line near the headquarters of the European Union was initially thought to be the work of one suicide bomber, the brother of a suicide bomber who had struck the airport one hour earlier. But now surveillance video has peaked instigators' interests in a man who was standing close to the known bomber holding a large bag at the metro. It is not clear whether that man is dead or alive or if he was involved.

Investigators have also identified the second airport suicide attacker. He is Najim Laachraoui, on the far left of your screen, and known to counterterrorism experts as a skilled ISIS bomb-maker. He is suspected not only of supplying the bombs that were used in Paris last November, but also of coordinating those attacks in the fall.

And separately, the Paris terror suspect whom Belgian police arrested last Friday, no longer fighting extradition back to France. According to his lawyer, Saleh Abdeslam also has stopped cooperating with the Belgian police. Abdeslam had close ties to all three of the identified Brussels attackers.

The question of potential ties to suspects or cells in the United States, however, was put to the head of the FBI, and here is James Comey's response to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR: Any time there's a terrorist attack overseas, we immediately focus on two things here in the states. First, are there any connections into the United States to the people who committed the attack overseas? And second, is there any risk that any of our subjects in place in the United States who will see it as a copycat opportunity? So we're very focused on both of those things. So far we don't see any indication of that here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Well, the intelligence gathering certainly begins at the home of the killers. I want to go back to Brussels now and reporter Chris Burns, who's standing by and reporting live with some just- breaking information, Chris, about those raids that are ongoing in those brothers' homes, the el-Bakraoui brothers, who were obviously killed in those attacks. What are they finding in these raids?

CHRIS BURNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Ashleigh, so far what we're hearing is that the raid happened yesterday and it was not - it was inconclusive so far. That's what authorities are saying. The two brothers, of course, Khalid (ph) el-Bakraoui was the one who set off the bomb here inside of the metro station, where I'm standing. And at the airport that was Ibrahim el-Bakraoui who set off the suicide bomb at the airport.

And they are also looking for another suspect, as you said, the one who was seen with a heavy bag, a large bag, here at the station on surveillance cameras. They're looking for that - that man, unidentified. The other person at the airport that was seen, the guy with a hat at the airport that was seen on surveillance cameras, they're looking for him as well.

What is also interesting is that the prosecutors' office said today that Khalid el-Bakraoui had a false identification and got a safe house - rented a safe house for the Paris attackers here in Brussels. That house was raided last December, nothing found. But there you're connecting the dots. The dots with Khalid - with the attacks here in Brussels this week, as well as the ones in Paris last November.

[12:05:28] Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: And I know you're - I know you're having some difficulty hearing me, so hopefully you can - you can hear this. The American Airlines officials had said this morning they wanted to get flights back into the airport in Brussels by I think Saturday. But we're learning that's - that's just not going to be possible with a forensics scene to the extent that it is at that airport. How long do they really expect that they can - they can manage that scene before they can open it?

BURNS: Yes. Well, Ashleigh, you know, it takes days to do this. We saw them working overnight here. They work round the clock trying to gather information, trying to just comb every bit and piece of this subway, and whatever was left of the bomb. And that, of course, is even exponentially greater in that airport where it was even a greater blast in a larger area. So imagine having to go through every single inch of that airport - the terminal there, the departure terminal, is going to take a very long time. So authorities, as far as we know, are not saying exactly when they're going to finish. Perhaps they couldn't even tell us if they wanted to.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: All right, our Chris Burns joining us live from Brussels. Thank you for that.

I want to bring in now my experts. Michael Weiss is a CNN contributor, senior editor at "The Daily Beast" and author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." Bob Baer is a CNN intelligence and security analyst and a former CIA operative himself.

Bob, let me begin with you. There's news out this morning that perhaps the direction of this attack in Belgium may have had more puppeteering from Syria than we originally thought. A, does that surprise you and, b, does that matter?

BOB BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: It does matter, Ashleigh. I mean, you know, we've been talking about these explosives, TATP. I mean you can - I can teach you in a day how to make these, but if I want you to truly be proficient, I'd want you to spend some time on a range in Syria so you're doing it every day, keeping it cold, watching out for static, all sorts of things, there's rules. So a really trained bomb-maker is going to - needs a range to practice. So I would imagine we're going to find out that the bomb-makers in these attacks did some training in Syria, came back, used to combat, their trade craft was pretty good. And I think in Raqqa, while they may not be calling up on the phone and say, launch the attack now, they certainly have been in touch with these Belgian networks and have urged them to go on and make attacks, because Raqqa is in trouble. And what they're going to do, the more trouble they get in, if we take Mosul, they're going to lash out in Europe and possibly the United States.

BANFIELD: Well, let's talk about just trying to chase down those responsible and those who may have plans in the future.

And, Michael, you wrote a piece that was extraordinarily critical of the counterterror picture in the European Union, and Belgium in particular. I want to sort of break down the theories of what's going wrong over there.

MICHAEL WEISS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes.

BANFIELD: And a lot of Americans believe this is a major problem, as well. Americans in the industry. The lack of resources, the structural problems and the lack of coordination. Let's start with the police in Belgium. There's 10,000 of them in Brussels.

WEISS: Right.

BANFIELD: Divided into six different categories. And if you think about that, the NYPD alone has, what, 34,500 officers.

WEISS: Right.

BANFIELD: That's pretty miraculous, that discrepancy.

WEISS: It is. And, I mean, you know, like I said before, every terror suspect requires between 20 to 25 people to surveil, or to track this person. Amedy Coulibaly, the guy who shot up the kosher marketplace in France a year ago, he was using 20 different cell phones to coordinate his attacks or to plan his attacks. That required about 20 different people to monitor the signals' intelligence.

But the - you know, the deeper issue here is that the, you know, the Belgian authorities have been dealing with this infiltration problem for decades. You have these ghettoized communities, such as Molenbeek and Brussels, where radical Salafi jihadi preachers have been, you know proselytizing, radicalizing young generation Muslims for, you know, many, many years. And this has all taken place in open view. And the lack of human intelligence, having informants from these communities, having, you know, native Muslims or people from North Africa who essentially become police officers to do a kind of broken windows theory of counterterrorism, all of this has just absent.

BANFIELD: So I - this should underscore the problem. I truly thought 10,000 was for the entire country of Belgium. Or was for - you know -

WEISS: Yes.

BANFIELD: And that is for the whole country, 10,000. Not just Brussels,

WEISS: Right.

BANFIELD: For the whole country it's 10,000. But beyond that, there are laws and there have been a lot of criticisms lobbied at the different kinds of laws. They - some call them very liberal laws. Like a law in Brussels where you're not allowed to conduct raids -

[12:10:12] WEISS: Right. BANFIELD: Between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. so as to not disturb, I assume, the sleep of a family.

WEISS: Correct.

BANFIELD: And then there are some exceptions. But that does seem like it might be ripe for change.

WEISS: Well, it's a tradeoff between liberty and security, isn't it? And, you know, to have a country that has a very high degree of civil liberties, when they're facing this massive terrorism problem on their own doorstep, you know, yes, I think now is - it's a wake-up call. The question is, we've had so many wake-up calls in the past. You know, the France - the Paris massacre was plotted and essentially carried out remotely from Brussels. The Belgians have this on their hands. So if they're not prepared to engage with this policy of just, you know, as you say, let's not knock on peoples' doors during certain hours of the night, I mean this is ridiculous.

BANFIELD: Yes.

WEISS: You know, it's time to step up their game.

BANFIELD: I want to talk about the - about the coordination or the stunning lack thereof. And, Bob Baer, as I read through the European Union and how it is - it almost sounds like a group of Keystone Cops. Let me give a bit of a picture.

Brussels alone has six separate police forces, as I mentioned before. Apparently they don't communicate well just within themselves. There's no single terrorist database or no-fly list. Turkey actually did a deportation of Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, one of these bombing killers, last summer. And Belgium still did not link him to terror. All of this as Interpol estimates - rather Europol estimates 5,000 Europeans have been radicalized. But I think the technical lists only enumerate about 2,700 or at least name about 2,700. It sounds like it is almost an insurmountable project, but clearly after two attacks like this just four months apart, there's got to be a wholesale change between all of these counter terror operatives regardless of their borders.

BAER: Exactly, Ashleigh. When I was in the CIA, we - frankly, we dealt with the Belgians. We couldn't figure them out, their system. We could never get answers out of them on terrorism cases. You'd call them up and you wouldn't get a response and ever would get a response. We couldn't even figure out the names of the services it was so complicated. And this has not changed. It's been institutionalized.

You also have a country that's - it's divided ethnically between the Flemish Francophones, which makes it worse, and then you have a whole organized crime groups there. The fact that these people can buy Kalashnikov rifles so easily, the Belgian police have refused to deal with this marketing, as they have drugs and everything else. But it's a notorious place, if you want to buy a gun, go to Brussels.

BANFIELD: All right, Bob Baer and Michael Weiss, thank you both for your insight on this. I appreciate it. Coming up next, the sad reality of why so many of the dead and of the

wounded actually have yet to even be identified. The carnage and the chaos at two massive crime scenes. The fact that victims came from all over the world, many of them still unconscious, unable to speak their own names. All of it making this an excruciatingly difficult process. So how do you conduct the identity project? You'll find out, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:17:16] BANFIELD: You have probably heard the figure 270 people being injured in the Brussels attacks. But what you don't think about when you hear that number is that many of these injuries are actually life-changing and they could lead to death still. Many of the wounded have been sent now to military hospitals, military hospitals, and that's because their wounds are like war wounds, like on the battlefield, burns, shrapnel, severe. Atika Shubert spoke to one of the first medics on the scene at the Brussels airport.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Now 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.

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 Vees was among the first medics at the airport.

SHUBERT (on camera): What was the first thing that you saw when you got to the scene?

JAN VEES, BELGIAN DEFENSE MEDIC: Chaos. Dust. Chaos. People shouting, crying. All people crossing, help here, over here. It was - it was a - it was unfamiliar. I've never seen it before. It was a - it was a war zone.

SHUBERT (voice-over): For 20 years he has served as a military medic in places like Afghanistan, but he had never seen anything like this. A bomb that investigators believe was packed with nails and bolts.

VEES: I saw a lot of people with holes in their body. The people were hit by pieces that flew around. I saw children with wounds that - penetrating wounds. So it has to be some explosive device. Things around - floating around, with a great - with a great power.

SHUBERT: Outside the hospital, soldiers stand guard. The Belgian flag flies at half-staff.

SHUBERT (on camera): Do you also have the picture of your girlfriend?

SHUBERT (voice-over): Twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Selemani is searching for his girlfriend, 24-year-old Sabrina Esmiel Fasel (ph). They have a one-year-old son.

SHUBERT (on camera): What kind of a person is she?

JONATHAN SELEMANI, GIRLFRIEND MISSING AFTER ATTACKS: She's very shy. She's short. And she's (INAUDIBLE) -

SHUBERT: Strong.

SELEMANI: Strong, yes.

SHUBERT: She's a strong person?

SELEMANI: Yes, she's a strong person, yes.

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.

[12:20:02] SHUBERT (on camera): Are you worried that maybe she's be injured and maybe unconscious?

SELEMANI: I don't think - I don't think.

SHUBERT: You don't want to think about it.

SELEMANI: I - I don't want to think about, yes.

SHUBERT (voice-over): At hospitals across Brussels, the heartbreaking search for answers continues.

Atika Shubert, CNN, Brussels.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BANFIELD: And we haven't even begun to address the psychological injuries. But identifying these victims, which is where we are right now, is still proving to be very difficult because many of the bodies are not intact. And then, of course, there are many people who cannot even speak if they survive this at all.

I want to bring in CNN contributor Larry Kobilinsky, who's a forensic scientist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, if I can begin with you. Let's start with the living and those medical hospitals, all of those medical personnel who have military backgrounds, because that's what they're dealing with. It looks like a war zone. As a doctor, take me through this kind of triage and how you start to identify people who can't help you identify themselves.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, that last part can be challenging sometimes without a doubt. But as far as that first part goes, you know, with the nature of explosions, these are in part war zone-like injuries because of what happens during an explosion. You have this explosion that causes this ultra pressurized blast. Even before there is shrapnel, it's that blast that causes compression of various organs in the body and the lungs and things like that and those can sometimes be difficult injuries to diagnose.

Afterward then comes the - all the shrapnel, bomb fragments, other shrapnel that can cause these sorts of penetrating injuries. And then that third wave, where the bodies move one on top of the other. So that's what they sort of expect to see when the first responders arrive on a scene like this.

But then actually being able to identify people who have been so gravely injured, they're in an ICU, on a breathing machine or something like that, can be challenging. That's a challenge, no matter the cause of what's happened here, trying to find family members, trying to find identification, and, in some cases, even doing DNA analysis, all that sort of stuff, even though they are living, some can sometimes be done. But right now, obviously, the priority for so many of those patients in those military hospitals is just taking care of them.

BANFIELD: Saving them, right?

GUPTA: Yes, saving them.

BANFIELD: Yes, the I.D. process, that can come later.

GUPTA: Correct.

BANFIELD: Although, God, the suffering of their families who are still looking for them. Just quickly, and I know every country and every hospital may have a different logistics setup, but do they actually tag the unidentified as say, Jane and John Doe, one through 270, or how do they actually try to keep some kind of record?

GUPTA: That - that is - that is - that is part of it. And it's a little bit different in some countries in Europe versus the United States, for example. In the United States, as Larry I know can talk to, it's the pathologists that are really running the show. In many European countries, the pathologists are still running the show, but the police are sort of overseeing it. And there is a different sort of process to at least identify and tag and then go back and identify the bodies more conclusively. So they may have an idea right now, they may be pretty confident, but they don't have firm confirmation on the identification yet.

BANFIELD: Well, let me switch over to Larry for a moment about that and -

LARRY KOBILINSKY, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Sure

BANFIELD: I want to move, actually, from those who survived to the scene, because I was astounded when I heard American Airlines thought they might be able to fly into the airport this weekend. Just given the notion of - forensics work is hard enough as it is. This is like putting a dozen people in a blender -

KOBILINSKY: Right.

BANFIELD: And then trying to sort them out later. I mean I hate to be that morbid, but this is the horrifying challenge they have.

KOBILINSKY: It's a terrible scene to work. But, you know, mass disasters happen, plane crashes, terrorist activities. And we have highly specialized, trained individuals. They're a part of mortuary teams, and they are primarily pathologists with other kinds of scientists, DNA experts, odontologists, dentists. And the idea is to collect every part. You've got to document everything, sketch it, photograph it, but certainly collect every single body part. If the body is more or less intact, you could help - you could try to identify by height, weight, gender, hair color, eye color, dental records, fingerprints. They're doing -

BANFIELD: And they're - they're asking families for eye color and last-known clothing.

KOBILINSKY: Absolutely.

BANFIELD: Yes.

KOBILINSKY: But on top of this, you need to create a DNA database of close relatives or samples that we know come from these individuals and that way DNA testing can help you put together all of the various pieces. Because, ultimately, next of kin is going to want to bury their loved ones and they - so we need to get everything together, kind of like a puzzle, putting the pieces together, so that, you know, these people can be laid to rest.

BANFIELD: What's remarkable is how quickly they were able to identify those bombers, who clearly must have been very close to ground zero of those explosions.

[12:25:05] KOBILINSKY: Indeed.

BANFIELD: And, obviously, would have - there would have been a lot to collect at that point.

KOBILINSKY: Indeed.

BANFIELD: It's such a morbid topic, but it's important because this is the horrifying work that these authorities are having to do.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you so much. And Dr. Kobilinsky, if you could stay around, I've got a couple more questions for you in a moment.

KOBILINSKY: A pleasure.

BANFIELD: Thank you to you two.

Up next, the identification process goes on one by one. We start to learn about more about those who lost their lives, and those who were hurt. And one of them has a story, family, friends who are mourning or praying for them to heal, as does every other one. More of the names and the faces behind this tragedy, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:30:14] BANFIELD: There are still