Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

26 Dead, 130 Injured in Belgium Terror Attacks. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired March 22, 2016 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: -- built up a new network around him with the specific purpose of carrying out attacks. People have been treading very carefully about criticizing the Belgian authorities at such a time, but there is a real consternation that we heard in the aftermath of the capture of Salah Abdeslam that they were surprised to find him in Molenbeek, the area that was the first place they looked in the days after the Paris attack. And then to hear again that they feels blindsided given how central Belgium is and how connected all of Europe's capital cities are to each other, there is a worry about the domino effect of the Belgian authorities inability, as one source put it, to get ahead of this threat.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: There is little question that even what we heard from President Francois Hollande of France that when he talked about international cooperation and more action together, we're goings see some things change specifically in Belgium probably soon in terms of international cooperation. And let's just remind everybody why. You're looking at Nima Elbagir. She is in Brussels, Belgium, because there were coordinated terror attacks there this morning. That is the word from Belgian authorities.

Here is what we understand at this time. At the airport there in Brussels there were two explosions which authorities believe were coordinated suicide attacks. They happened at the ticket desk that was before the security. As we're all familiar with in most airports these days at the ticket desk when you go to check in, that is before security. That is where the explosions happened. You are looking at the result of them -- windows blown out, dozens and dozens of people injured, many of them badly injured. There is still ongoing triage inside that airport. You are looking at the subsequent evacuation.

There are certainly numbers of those who lost their lives that are going to rise. What you see on the screen is what we're being told by authorities, but it is not the final count.

Now you are looking at what happened an hour later. So this started at 8:00 in the morning local time, about an hour later 9:00 in the morning, in a metro station, a subway, another attack in the dark between stations. Again, over a dozen there killed. Another active triage situation even more complicated than the first because of the dark and the tight spaces in getting people to safety.

This is what it looked like for the first responders as they got down there. It is amazing how many they evacuated and how quickly. So that is what's going on. That is why Nima Elbagir is in front of that airport. And what are you seeing in terms of restoring order from the chaos that we saw during that immediate evacuation, the situation now?

ELBAGIR: Where we are really is the staging ground for the police response. Just behind me, Chris, you can see the lined up motorcycle of police outriders. We saw the forensic teams and the ambulances headed out from this is the other side, the backside of the airport. It's just in front of the airport security building. Clearly there is still an ongoing response into the airport. The forensics teams getting in early on even while the situation was being stabilized to get as much evidence as they can for the potential investigation.

The prime minister has said that a judge has already been put in place to allow them to enact any of the powers they will need to hold any suspects. And they are looking to clean up whatever of this network remains out there because as much as the stabilizing of the train station and the airport is important, it isn't a source of danger anymore as far as they understand it. The danger for them is, who else is out there? And that is their priority right now, Chris.

CUOMO: It's a point well made. Coordinated, which is the term they use, often speaks to a continuing or future threat as well. And that is what we're rear hear right now, that after what happened at the metro there are now secondary investigations going to do exactly what you suggest, which is to find out who else could be involved.

Remember the backdrop for all this, what happened in the Paris attacks when then routed to Belgium in what say see is a very active layering of terror networks there. How many, how concerted they are. Those are all unknowns. So what does this mean to you when you hear that there is a secondary investigation to see what "coordinated" meant in this situation?

ELBAGIR: Well the reality is that everything has been emerging in the aftermath of Paris has pointed to essentially a lattice work of interconnecting networks. And even the way that Salah Abdeslam eventually as we understand it was captured was because he contacted someone within another network that was already on the authority's radar, that was already under surveillance. And it really gives you a sense of interlocking, interconnected cells.

[08:05:06] And that is what the authorities are dealing with now, unraveling all of that. The prosecutor just a day was talking about the reality of 216 active investigations, 216 active files. That is overwhelming for any intelligence apparatus, let alone the apparatus of a small country like Belgium. So when we hear the French speak about international cooperation, that's why, because the Belgians need as much broader sport as they can get here. Back to you, Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you so much for that update. We'll check back with you. Now we want to get to Nic Robertson because the attacks come four days after the last suspect who participated in the Paris attack was captured in Belgium. Are these two things connected? CNN's Nic Robertson is live in London with the latest. Nic, what are you hearing? NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is going to be a

major line of investigation with counterterrorism officials. It has to be. The reason is very simple. Salah Abdeslam was arrested Friday. On Saturday morning his lawyer announced publicly that he was cooperating with the police and helping them. That if not a message, if not a direct message to his supporters that you have a finite amount of time before you are going to be arrested as well because I'm going to give up information, or was it quite simply a message you need to act now, you need to act fast.

What is known about Salah Abdeslam in the recent weeks, the house he had been hiding out in until a week ago, which was raided last Tuesday by Belgian authorities, in that premises not just automatic weapons, but detonation equipment for detonating things likes suicide vests that we saw were used today, that Belgian authorities said were used today.

The Paris prosecutor over the weekend laid out some evidence that the French have about Salah Abdeslam. They say not only was he involved in the logistics of the Paris attack but he was also procuring equipment, chemicals that were used to make the detonators. It is not clear of his level of expertise. It's not clear of his level of bomb making skills, but he now seems to be directly connected with some very central part for a future plot and a past plot and also with a certain level of connection on the explosives.

So is his arrest directly connected? It is certainly going to be a leading point for the investigation. And it is hard to look at this and say that these two are not connected. The attacks in the same city where he was arrested coming just days after any associates that are close to him would very realistically realize they have a finite amount of time to act before they, too, could also be arrested. Chris?

CUOMO: All right, Nic, thank you very much.

Let's bring in the panel now, Peter Bergen, CNN national security analyst we have with us. We also have Paul Cruickshank, CNN terrorism analyst and editor in chief in the "CTC Sentinel," terrorism studies journal. And we also have Michael Weiss, CNN contributor and author of "ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror." Paul Cruickshank, much of what we understand about intelligence community and Belgium and the ongoing actions after the Paris attacks comes from you. Unfortunately, this is also your home. And I know this is a sensitive situation for you on many different levels. What can you tell us about what is reverberating through the halls of the intelligence community there right now about what happened this morning?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, Chris, it's not a surprise to them, but obviously there is a certain amount of shock in Brussels right now that terrorism has again come to Brussels. We saw back in May, 2014, an attack on a Jewish museum by a French ISIS operative. Four people were killed in that attack. But this is on a whole different scale.

As the investigations have proceeded with the Paris attacks, it's become increasingly clear that those attacks were planned from Brussels, staged from Brussels, that the plotters had three safe houses there. They waited to the last 48 hours to come Paris to launch those attacks.

There were 10 individuals involved in those attacks in Paris and Salah Abdeslam was the only surviving individual, and he was arrested on Friday. But there was a larger network behind these attacks in play. Many of those individuals still at large, including potentially a suspected bomb maker who on the night of the attacks in Paris was helping to coordinate from Brussels by phone. Somebody's who DNA was found in the bomb factory in Brussels that the group set up to build suicide vests for the Paris attacks.

[08:10:00] And when they moved in exactly a week ago on the hiding place of Salah Abdeslam and several other accomplices, they found an ISIS flag, a Kalashnikov, detonating explosives, and ammunition, suggesting that there was another plot in the works against some kind of target in Belgium, some kind of target in Europe. And the working theory is going to be right now the remnants of that cell who they haven't managed to arrest carried out this attack today in Brussels, Chris.

CAMEROTA: Peter, I want to pick up where Paul left off. After the Paris attacks there was this sense that it is only a matter of time before something happens in Brussels because there was so much of this spider web that led back to Brussels and to that neighborhood of Molenbeek. So what has gone wrong in Brussels? Why has that become such a hotbed?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, you know, there is no Belgian dream, there is no French dream, there is no British dream. There is no EU dream. There is an American dream which has worked pretty well for American Muslim tourists who are well educated and have the same average incomes and don't live in ghettos just like any other American.

And so the American dream has sort of been a firewall to a large degree to this kind of thing, Alisyn, whereas in Belgium or France, pick your European country, it's often ghettoized. If you are a Muslim citizen you are often discriminated against. Take one statistic -- 10 percent of the French population is Muslim, and yet 70 percent of their prison population is Muslim. And I think that statistic speaks for itself.

And so, you know, as Americans watch all this, they must surely be asking themselves, what is the level of threat in the United States? And there is some bad news, which is last year saw 60 cases in the United States almost entirely American citizens inspired by ISIS prosecuted by the Department of Justice. That is the largest number of cases since 9/11.

The good news is that these tend to be lone wolves. They tend to have low capacities. These are not part of organized groups as we saw in Paris which involved at least two dozen people, many of whom were trained in Syria. This is nothing like what we've seen in Brussels where clearly this was an organized group that had multiple people and a support network. So the bad news in the United States is ISIS is radicalizing quite a number of American citizens. The good news is they tend to be lone wolves and therefore their capacities to do a complex, coordinated attack as we see today in Brussels or as we saw in Paris in November are really quite low.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Weiss, you were talking last hour with us about this idea of terror in reserve and sort of speaking off what Peter Bergen was saying, this idea that operatives are sort of driven underground, and they were even concerned about that after France, after Paris, and now again with Belgium. If these operatives are driven underground the threat of them rising and striking again like we've seen what happened in Belgium.

MICHAEL WEISS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes. And there is an improvisational quality to all this. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was the coordinator or rather the commander of the Paris attacks, remember, prior to that about a year before was responsible for orchestrating this essentially prospective plot in Belgium in the city where the largest gunfight since the end of World War II had taken place in a counterterrorism raid on that compound, in that building. They found a small army of -- or a small arsenal of weaponry including TATP, the explosive that was used in the Paris attacks, GoPro cameras indicating that the operatives were going to film their atrocities in real time for later use in dissemination in the ISIS propaganda channels.

What I am surprised about, and I will be honest about this, Salah Abdeslam I had figured to be in ill odor with ISIS because he chickened out of the Paris attacks. Remember, he had a suicide vest on which he tossed in the garbage. Maybe it didn't work and maybe this is the reason they kept him active.

It seems he essentially inherited a role of the kind of chief liaison or the chief coordinator of this network. And if he's been spending the last four months plotting and planning to carry out another attack, then his capture may indeed have accelerated something that was already in the works for a long time.

But again, it is very difficult to figure where they are going to strike next because they don't always know. It's as needs meet, and as these developments occur and as their networks or and their safe houses are raided or rounded up.

So I think we have to be a little fair to the Belgian authorities. We've been beating up on them for a while that they are incompetent or their not coordinated and all that. If your city is completely checker blocked, honeycombed operatives who have either returned from Syria and Iraq or have been radicalized locally.

[08:15:02] And as Peter was saying, this is a very special problem in Europe with these ghettoized communities, radical taliphite (ph) preachers who are basically doing the work of ISIS on their own soil. It's - its almost impossible to know where the next attack is going to occur.

CUOMO: Well Michael, you make a strong point there, something that we learned the hard way, spending way too much time in Paris for exactly the same reason. So let's take it back to Paul Cruickshank. Again, Paul, I've stood next to you for many hours with you lending us understanding, not just to this relationship between Belgium authorities and France authorities, but what's going on all over Europe.

And then we have what happened at this airport. We're always looking at the next application of the threat, and of course in most international airports you can walk in and before you get to security do whatever you want to do around lots of people. Is that something that you can effectively change?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, there's no doubt that ISIS' M.O. right now is to kill as many people as possible, to target crowded spaces. Airports are by nature crowded spaces. Before people get through security they have to go through queues.

And so the message that has come from the ISIS high command is kill as many people as you can, create as big a impact as you can. And I think as ISIS continues to lost some ground in Syria and Iraq, and they've lost about 22 percent of their territory there in the last year or so, we can expect a surge in the number of terrorism attacks.

The ISIS message has been we're remaining, we're expanding and launching these attacks is a sort of way to change the conversation from them losing ground in Syria and Iraq, and also that they feel this is a divinely ordained caliphate. And they feel that it is under attack by western countries. And Belgium is launching air strikes against ISIS in Iraq, so they feel a religious imperative to retaliate with all means possible, and their followers believe that they will be rewarded in paradise by doing this.

So, I think we're entering a very, very dangerous period right now. There needs to be a much greater urgency from the international community than even there is right now about this ISIS threat in Syria and Iraq. They're still going to be there for the foreseeable future. I don't think many people expect Mosul, for example, their headquarters in Iraq, to be liberated this year or any time soon.

So, we're going to be living with this threat in Europe for many years ahead. And Belgium, Chris, really is at the eye of the storm. There are, as you know, a very large number of Belgian extremists who have gone to travel most to -- to Syria and Iraq. Many of them joining up with ISIS, many coming back. These are people who have experience of killing in Syria and Iraq. And there are a number of francophone ISIS operatives right now who are basically trying to talent spot these new recruits coming in and turning them around as quickly as possible to send them back to launch attacks in Europe.

CAMEROTA: Peter, I want to get your thoughts on something that Michael just talked about, and that is Abdeslam having fallen out of favor with ISIS because first he didn't detonate his belt, and then there was word from officials that he was actually cooperating since his arrest and maybe giving information. Is that -- do you think that is connected to the timing that his cohorts felt, uh-oh, he may have given up some important information, we better act now? BERGEN: Common sense would suggest yes. I mean, clearly, yes, his

arrest was a very big news story. Now whether he was cooperating or not, you couldn't take the risk of not acting if you had a plan in the pipeline.

So, you know, clearly this is not something the overall plot wasn't developed over the last four day. But the actual - you know, the cause, the occasion was something that clearly his arrest must have sped up. I mean, there's no other explanation for why it would happen now.

PEREIRA: Peter, I'm going to stick with you for a second because I wanted to ask you about the -- we've seen so many of these attacks. We know that each time one happens counterterrorism officials reevaluate their plan, their stance, their preparedness. Given what we've been watching, and the fact that U.S. terror officials here were concerned about the ongoing situation in Belgium, how do you think they're going to now pivot, or if they will?

BERGEN: Well I think they should do effectively a European wide 9/11 commission. After all, these networks don't exist in one country, they are related to each other as we've been talking throughout the morning, both in Belgium and France and quite possible in other European countries. And you know, typically European countries do not have a 9/11 commission of the kind of seriousness that we had in the United States after 9/11.

[08:20:00] The British authorities did, I think, quite a weak investigation of the London attacks, which was the greatest -- deadliest attack in British history where 52 commuters were killed in 2005. And honestly, I don't see anything coming out of the French after the November attacks of any kind of seriousness in terms of a public inquiry about what went wrong, and most importantly how can we improve things.

And you don't -- those - those sorts of things don't come about just because you say, well, we need to improve things. Those come about because you have a multi-year serious public process in which you, you know, you have the power to subpoena people. And you could imagine, for instance, the European parliament saying it's time for us to really get our act together and do something meaningful in the light of these attacks today in Brussels.

PEREIRA: Yes, especially when you think about how close those buildings in the European parliament were to the Maelbeek metro station where there were many, many casualties.

We're going to ask our panel to stick around. Michael Weiss, Peter Bergen, and Paul Cruickshank, thank you so much. We'll get to you, Chris, now in Havana.

CUOMO: Absolutely, Mick. And you know, one of the things we have to deal with in this situation is -- while the urgency is playing out in Brussels, it's reverberating all around Europe and beyond. Let's go to Jim Bitterman in Paris. And again, Jim, you know, I've leaned on you for many hours to develop

our understanding of what's going on, the relationship between Belgium and what happened in France very real. We're now learning more about these locations. You know, this metro station that was targeted in Brussels is very near E.U. locations of operations, the U.S. embassy, so that won't avoid notice of investigators. And of course this triggering more troops to the border, a heightened security awareness and intelligence activity in Paris as well. What are you understanding?

JIM BITTERMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, exactly that, Chris. They are putting out 1,600 more military officials and security folks at the various transportation hubs around France. But when you boil that down, I mean, Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, that means about 150 more people. It doesn't seem to be a whole lot more than what's already out there.

The fact is we're under a state of emergency here which prevents also that -- allows the police all sorts of draconian measures like stop and search without reason, like sequestering people in their houses. There's all sorts of things and all measures they can already take, and the question is, are they taking them? And one of the things that your panel was just talking about there that's so interesting is this coordination between the European - the various European authority.

Now, President Hollande was on the - on television just a little bit ago saying, look, this was an attack on Belgium, but it was really an attack on Europe. And the fact that it has paralyzed today, that all European Union offices in Brussels are closed, has got to be a dramatic thing for various authorities across Europe to confront on some kind of European-wide basis.

Now, we've got a commission here, a parliamentary commission in France that after the November 13th attacks is starting to look at what went wrong, what the police did right and what they did wrong. But none of that has been made public and probably will be some months before that commission actually does anything that is going to be made public that we'll know about. So, it's - it's really kind of a little -- too little too late as far as a lot of people, I think, are concerned, especially when you see what happened this morning.

The French are on edge. Something like this morning's attack could very easily have happened here. The relationship between France and Belgium has been rocky up until the November 13th attacks, I think. And now it seems to have gotten better with the arrest of Abdeslam, but still there's a lot of sort of irritation that more things aren't being done on a European level.

One of the things the interior minister here said this morning, and surprising it doesn't exist already, is that there should be more done on PNRs, passenger name records. That's the kind of thing that already exists in the United States, but basically keeps track of who's flying, where they're flying to and all the rest. And the way, Chris, just to finish out, back to your question about can you control people arriving at airports? The interior minister also said this morning that he's going impose rules that at transportation hubs like train stations and airports, people who get access to the terminals have to have an ID card or a passport and a ticket. So that's going to change things. How they're going to impose it or enforce that is a real good question.

Chris?

CUOMO: Jim, thank you very much. Alisyn, to you with breaking news.

CAMEROTA: Okay, Chris. We do have some new details because the U.S. intelligence community is of course talking to their counterparts in Belgium and throughout Europe. CNN justice reporter Evan Perez is live in Washington with more. And what have you learned?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, Alisyn, one of the things that investigators are looking at at this point, again it's very early in the investigation, but one of the things they're looking at is the possibility that one of these explosions at the Brussels airport was caused by a bomb that was packed inside a suitcase.

[08:25:15] We know from the Brussels prosecutor - Brussel prosecutor and the prime minister's office, they held a press conference in the last hour, they said that one of the explosions was caused by a suicide bomber. We do not know, and investigators still are not sure whether or not we have two attackers that carried out the attacks there at the Brussels airport.

We do know, however, that they're looking into the possibility that one of the bombs was packed inside a suitcase. And obviously every time you travel you hear all of the messages that are being broadcasted say be careful about unattended bags and certainly draw attention to unattended bags. In this case, that may have been what caused at least one of the explosions.

One of the other things that -- among the other things that investigators are also looking at is that this is possibly just an improvised attack, in other words not something as sophisticated and as coordinated as what carried out - what was carried out by ISIS operatives in November in Paris. If you remember, we're talking about ten attackers there in Paris.

In this case it appears that these attackers were looking for targets of opportunity, a large crowd at the Brussels airport outside of the security cordon near the ticket counters. Again, that's where investigators are focused on right now. The second attack in Brussels, the second attack occurred at a transit station, a metro station in Maalbeek which is near the central area of - nearing central Brussels. So again, these are not as sophisticated and as coordinated as what happened in Paris. Obviously these are the hardest of targets for security officials to secure. These are very easy for terrorists to get into and for them to carry out these types of attacks, very difficult for securities to secure.

Alisyn?

PEREIRA: I'll take it here, Evan. Thank you so much for that. So, obviously the attacks are raising that question again about

whether airports are protected enough since the explosions in Belgium were set off in the departure hall before you go through security there at the Brussels airport.

Want to turn to Mary Schiavo, she is CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation. We keep hearing about these targets of opportunity, the improvised nature of these attacks. And that proves, Mary, the ongoing challenge for aviation officials of protecting an airport and its passengers considering that these explosions happened outside of the security area.

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: And it's very ironic that Belgium and it's transportation officials and authorities had cracked down on security at the new years and - and even before. And what they did is they strengthened security on the air side for incoming passengers, especially for anyone who didn't have any E.U. credentials.

And so, they had strengthened it from air side, but not, of course, from the street side, from the non-secure side. And the - what's happening in Europe is that they keep coming back and back and back again at the transportation facilities. For example, in Rome they had several arrests just in last July, and then again just two weeks ago for planning attacks on the train station. So, this is - is a soft target when approached from the outside.

And attacks in the past have been carried out with very few personnel. There were dual attacks in Rome and Vienna at the same time two decades ago and it was done with just seven people. So, it's an ongoing problem, one the United States wrestles with daily, and especially after September 11, 2001, it was very difficult to secure the airports from the street side as opposed to air side.

PEREIRA: So, we don't know the number of attackers in this situation, we don't know, but it seems as though it has the hallmarks of these lone wolf attacks that we've seen in the past, Mary. And you talk about that. In your estimation, is it possible? You think about the number of passengers and the number of people that are arriving and departing at a busy airport like the one we see there in Belgium, or any of our big international airports around the world. The number of passengers, the number of pickups, the taxis, the Ubers, all of that. It almost seems like we could not get our arms around it.

SCHIAVO: Well, it's very difficult, particularly, for example, in the United States with 468 passenger service -- public passenger service airports and, you know, 16,000 airports overall. But you know, this is a plan that had been grappled with after September 11, 2001. There were actually plans on the books to have, you know, off site passenger intake terminals where people would go off site from the airport and check through security and then be bussed to airports, and finally those plans were abandoned because they were just impossible given the number of airports we have and the way we have to move people through the facilities.

And so, strengthening them now and what's going happen I would assume at airports all over the world has already happened all over Europe.