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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Latest on Terror Attacks in Brussels; Reporting on Americans Injured in Brussels Attacks. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 24, 2016 - 12:30   ET

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


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[12:30:15] ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: There are still several people who are missing after the terror attacks in Brussels. And as their families scramble to get there, just get to Brussels, they are then faced with a task of going to hospital after hospital to look for their loved ones or provide dental records to those hospitals or DNA swabs to help in the I.D. process.

The missing and the deceased composed of 40 different nationalities. This is truly a global crisis.

Brynn Gingras joins me now live.

This has been so overwhelming for so many people to process what happened, let alone the people who trying to find missing that they hope survived.

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. It's sort of that weird limbo of they don't really know what happened, and maybe they don't really want to find out at this point. And that's certainly the case for the family of Sasha and Alexander Pindowski. They -- Alex was actually engaged to this family in this woman in the U.S. and her father has been speaking with us. He is actually right now in Brussels, as you said, Ashleigh, going hospital to hospital trying to see if possibly Alex or Sasha's name is on that missing list. And he just got in contact with us, and he says "No luck as of yet."

Who is on that injured list, though, is the wife of Andre Adams. She and her husband got separated inside the hospital terminal.

And right now no one has heard from Andre. And he was a U.S. ambassador for the U.S. and he was there, no luck. And his daughter is pleading for anyone's help.

Also on that list of missing people is Bart Migom. Now, we talk to his girlfriend who is here in Atlanta, she was waiting for him patiently, coming to Atlanta to spend sometime with her. And the last thing she heard from him was a text message, saying "I'm on my way to the airport and nothing since then." And she talked to Alisyn this morning on NEW DAY.

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EMILY EISENMAN, BART MIGOM'S GIRLFRIEND: Bart's parents are in the military hospital. They spent the entire day there yesterday, just standing by, waiting on the smallest information they could get of Bart. But there is still no information to be found.

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GINGRAS: And actually, forensics have been taken from Bart's family at this point to hopefully identify him. And really, the only other people that we know about is missing officially right now are Stephanie and Justin Shults. They are a couple from Tennessee. They were living in Brussels. They actually went to the airport with Justin's mother, dropped her off. She was almost through security and they got separated when these bombs exploded. So Justin and Stephanie, they have not been located. Their brother is also reaching out on social media, hoping to hopefully get some news. But, again, still don't know, so many questions.

BANFIELD: ... what they're going through. And I know the state department and the embassy over there. They're struggling as hard as anyone to figure out, sometimes you just don't know who you don't know.

GINGRAS: Exactly.

BANFIELD: And you don't know who was there, who wasn't there. So obviously this is a pretty tall task for them.

Brynn, thank you for that, appreciate it.

When it comes to the state department, they actually there are about a dozen Americans they think injured in these attacks. And we're starting to put a lot of the names to the faces. In fact, there is a name behind the man in this picture. His injuries so graphic, that we had to blur them. This is Sebastian Bellin, or Seb, for short, a former Oakland University basketball player. His former coach says Seb is a tremendous competitor and will fight through this.

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GREG KAMPE, OAKLAND UNIVERSITY COACH: We were told that he was dropped off at the airport. He was in line at the counter to check in. He was -- they dropped him off, six minutes later, the bomb went off. And, you know, he was within 100-yard radius of it.

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BANFIELD: Seb's wife says his leg was almost split in two. Doctors haven't had to amputate, thankfully. His hip was also broken and he had surgery yesterday to remove bomb fragments from his leg. He was able to speak to ABC's Good Morning America from his hospital bed about what he's going through and what was going through his mind just moments after the attack.

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SEBASTIAN BELLIN, INJURED IN BRUSSELS AIRPORT ATTACK: Just trying to tell myself, I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it. And When I got to the ambulance, I knew I was good. I just didn't want my girls to grow up without a dad, you know.

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BANFIELD: And I think you can safely say it was so much worse for other people, as well.

We have so far learned the names of three of the deceased victims. We'll start with Peruvian state news agency reporting that 36-year-old Adelma Tapia Ruiz died in this attack. She was at the airport. Adelma was there with her Belgian husband and twin 3-year-old daughters while waiting to board an airplane to New York. She was coming here for an Easter holiday family reunion. Her twin daughters and husband left the boarding area moments before the explosion. They survived.

[12:35:10] Leopold Hecht was a law student in Brussels. He was killed at the metro station. 45-year-old Olivier Delespesse was also killed on the subway on his way to work at the Federation of Wallonie- Bruxelles. He worked in the ministry for the french-speaking part of Belgium. And according to the New York Times, he was single, had no children and he treated his co-workers like his family.

Olivier's story and memories and stories of so many others we have yet to tell our absolutely heartbreaking. You can be involved. For information on how you can help the victims at the Brussels attack, go to cnn.com/impact.

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[12:40:12] BANFIELD: Terrorists bombed a major European airport this week. And you'd better believe that airports all around the world, millions of travelers took notice right away.

The terrorists' goal is to disrupt the whole world to make people afraid, and they certainly did that on Tuesday. You think people aren't on edge? Look what happened just yesterday in Atlanta. Watch this video.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know. I'm not sure if it's an exercise or an evacuation.

Oh, they're making us rush out of the terminal here. We're at the -- for some reason they're making us rush out of here and evacuate.

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BANFIELD: Obviously, we can just see people nervous on edge after what they had seen unfold on the news because of the airport in Brussels.

This was a false alarm, thank God. Look at that.

They ran frightened through the terminals when the rumor spread it might be a bomb or shooter. There was no shooter, there was no bomb. But there could be.

Brian Todd is with me now.

And Brian there is so much talk about the soft target areas at airports, the place where you can walk in and there are a lot of people with big, big packages and big, big bags. But very little security until you get to the part where you can board a plane, which in the past, those has been used as missiles.

So the Atlanta mayor has said, that things are going to change completely at Hartsfield Airport, one of the busiest airports, certainly busiest in America. There is going to be more sniper activity, more armed security. He says this is just the new normal. And I know that you spent the day at Reagan Airport in D.C. yesterday. Is that the same new normal there?

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It is very much the same new normal at Reagan national and at Dulles International Airport here in Washington, Ashleigh. Very much a mirror image of Atlanta, you're going to see this at major airports all over the United States.

What we saw there, a lot more security officers. We saw bomb detection dogs all over the place. These officers are carrying automatic weapons. It is a very visible, very stepped-up presence. And it's open-ended. We're getting really no indication of when this might subside. Maybe weeks, probably months after the Brussels attacks just -- it is a very edgy situation here in the nation's capital. And we've noticed a higher security presence around some government installations, as well, so security very much stepped up here in the Washington area, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Interesting. And they're talking even about maybe creating in Atlanta a precheck area, which means you don't get into these soft target areas as easily as you have in the past.

Brian Todd in Washington, thank you.

What was it like at the moment the terrorists exploded their bombs in Brussels, in the middle of the mayhem, the shrapnel, the screams and the smoke? You're going to see for yourself, coming up next.

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[12:47:51] BANFIELD: I'm about to run some video that fairly disturbing. So I do want to warn you, that this is the scene of the terror attack in Brussels.

Literally moments after the bombs went off. The dust hasn't even settled in these images. They are very raw, they're very graphic. If you've got children in the room, this might be the time to usher them out. You're going to see the images at the same time those frightened people who were in the airport and experienced it. Same images they saw in real life.

Watch and also listen because you may have some questions that we're going to try and answer afterwards.

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BANFIELD: People from 40 different countries were either killed or wounded. Innocent people who just happened to be in that airport hall when these terrorists decided that time and that place would be where their bombs would go off.

Larry Kobilinsky, is a criminal justice professor and expert on identifying people from DNA. Also all criminal forensics Bob Baer is back with us, CIA expert with analysis on perhaps some of the explosives and what information that video can tell us.

Dr. Kobilinsky, I want to start with you. The video you just saw, I don't know if from a forensics standpoint, it helps in the science that's being exacted right now in that aftermath. But does it tell you anything about the nature of this blast and does it help in the investigation to see that?

LARRY KOBILINSKY, FORENSIC SCIENTIST: Well, just looking at the extensive damage, you can see, this is a high explosive that went out. And it seems to me that this -- the shrapnel that was shot out of this bomb went in all directions.

I think most of the damage was at waist-level. In other words the suitcase was at waist level. Nothing was -- this was not a shaped charge, like a clay mar, anti-personnel mind which is designed to shoot shrapnel in one direction. This went out randomly, 360 degrees, at waist level.

It was designed to get a maximum kill. And the scene is chaotic with people, different kinds of damage to everything in that vicinity. It's extensive.

BANFIELD: When they pack those bombs, I think I've seen some of your research show, they would pack the C4 are using that or in this case TATP, at the very center of the case and surround in all directions so they have that multidirectional effect.

KOBILINSKY: That's right. TATP is a high explosive. I understand they may have added nitro cellulose to make this even more deadly then they and surround that with shrapnel. So when it goes off, you've got a hand grenade 1 million times over.

BANFIELD: Let me get Bob Baer in on this. And Bob, as -- I ask you this question, I want our viewers to take a look at the map that we've created for sort of the layout of the airport. This may make a little more sense for people, the entrances are varied. But you can see the blasts directly above the Starbucks location. It appears to be right in the center of the airport, Bob.

It appears they knew exactly where maybe their maximum potential might be, especially if they had a multidirectional bomb. Go to the center. And radiate out from that. But does tell you, is there a personality in bombing methodology that could and actually identify cells, people or even some of the material used to trace back to who had done it?

ROBERT BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: Yes, the actuator, all these bombs have a signature, even TATP bombs, how they're wired. They'll be able to reconstruct this. As far as using two bombers, that's the methodology, the Islamic state. Its message that we can take two suicide bombers it's not one person who is committed. It's a bunch of people.

And the fact there's bomb in the metro. This is a high explosive. It's got what's so-called a high brisance, it's a fast-moving explosive, much more than ammonium nitrate.

And the Doctor is right, you just -- you put nails around this, it's devastating. If it had been in a more confined area with all those people there'd be dead. But it's in fact, the high ceiling absorbed it, and of course, people right around the blast absorbed most of the shrapnel, saving people on the outer perimeter.

BANFIELD: Can I ask you about TATP itself? I know you called it the poor man's C4. But it itself is not a perfect substance. It has to be handled by people who get it, who don't mishandle it. It's delicate. You can have lots of accidents. And then there's something called the hydroscopic nature of it. Can you explain that to me?

BAER: Well, what they -- what these guys, they practice on this stuff and a hydroscopic means it absorbs water. So if you're carrying it in a highly humid atmosphere, you want it to in a container. It's very unstable, so you want to cool it, as well. And when you're making this, if you can make it in your kitchen you have to work -- worry about static. But any good bomb maker can eliminate the static on his body. So you take about five or six safety steps, and you can make it relatively safe.

[12:55:11] Now, but an amateur does it, gets on the internet and makes this stuff at home, you can almost count on it they will blow themselves up. But these people have been at this for years this reappeared in Iraq in 2004. We know the bomb-maker. He trained a lot of people.

And Ashleigh keep in mind the TATP can be painted inside of a suitcase. And put on an airplane. And as long as you put a plastic covering over it, you know you're capable of bringing down airplanes.

BANFIELD: Tragedy there.

BAER: Yeah ...

BANFIELD: The tragedy there, at an airport, you can try to identify a suitcase as a problem. But you are never going to be able to identify a suitcase at an airport.

Larry Kobilinsky and Bob Baer, thank you both for your insights. Appreciate it. And thank you everyone for watching.

My colleague, Wolf Blitzer, picks up our special coverage of the Brussels attack after a quick break. And we're going to leave you now with some images from the memorial site from in Brussels, Belgium.

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