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26 Dead, 130+ Injured in Belgium Terror Attacks. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired March 22, 2016 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00] MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Now and what's going happen I would assume at airports all over the world. It's already happened all over Europe. Most European nations have now say a crackdown security is they will use also local police authorities to check cars and purses coming into the airport, which will slow the approach to the airport property dramatically, but it has to be done.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: So we - we're hearing from our Evan Perez that the focus of the investigation or one of the many focuses of this investigation - because there are going to be many arms to it - was a bag, potentially that there was a suitcase that may have had explosives in it.

And we've seen how these improvised ideas have been used around the world sort of testing the waters to see if they can indeed infiltrate in that way.

Mary, are we making any headway on the screening, are we making any headway on getting ahead of the bad guys, if you will, in terms of being able to detect these devices ahead of time?

SCHIAVO: Well, sure, at the airport, when the bag goes through screening, it has - it has improved leap years ahead since 2001 and it's, you know, it's so much better than it was at that time. But that assumes that your bag and the people have gone through security.

PEREIRA: Right.

SCHIAVO: And by approaching it from the street side as opposed to airside, they have escaped that. We don't have those mechanisms in place to do that. And that's why a lot of it comes down to those warnings by airport security officials saying, if you see something, say something or report bags. But a bag like that left in a terminal would be very difficult to get it off of airport property where you could detonate it safely off airport property in time, particularly if someone was nearby and detonating it. And that's the problem. Once you get to the airport, you're in an area of extreme vulnerability before you approach security. And, remember, just a few years ago we had someone with a gun, of course, attack at LAX -

PEREIRA: Yes.

SCHIAVO: On the street side. So it's a huge area of vulnerability and what will probably happen is more screening as people approach the airport in their cars, taxis, et cetera. PEREIRA: And we've seen that at some airport where they have sort of

preliminary screening and the drive up to either your departure or pickup gate.

Mary Schiavo, our thanks to you for your insight.

We'll turn to Chris now.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: All right, let's remind everybody what we're in the middle of right now. We are covering coordinated, multiple attacks in Belgium. It started 8:00 in the morning local time at the Brussels Airport. There were two separate explosions that authorities are now calling coordinated suicide attacks. Dozens of people were killed. Many, many more were injured, some of them very badly. There is still ongoing triage.

Then and an hour after those attacks, there was a separate attack in the metro, the subway in Brussels, located close to the stop to U.S. and E.U. operations places, as well as the U.S. embassy there. That explosion may have been, according to authorities, detonated with the use of a bag or some other container. Again, people there, over a dozen lost their lives. Again, a very active triage situation there.

We have Nima Elbagir on the scene outside the Brussels airport. She's been reporting for us all morning on what's going on. We do know the response was quick, but also that the situation is still fluid and ongoing. What's the latest?

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The response is still ongoing. The operations have begun we understand. They began pretty much immediately across the city. Belgian prosecutors won't give us any more details than that. They've actually asked for the media and the general public to be very careful about the information that's being put out into the public domain about potentially any raids that are occurring, where they're occurring. They really want to try and minimize the detail that anyone out there can use to evade capture because they believe that the predomination, the proliferation of information in the public domain was part of the reason that they weren't able to really close in the net around Salah Abdeslam in the days following the Paris attacks. So since then they've been trying to really be very careful about what they put out there.

Just - I mean you really reset for us what happened here, but let's just remind viewers what happened at that train station. The video that we've been seeing, Chris, is absolutely horrifying. People walking through those tracks in the dark, being ushered through by security forces. One eyewitness that we spoke to who was in another carriage from the Locus (ph) - another train, I should say, from the locus (ph) of the explosion, describes feeling a gust of wind. They actually felt the blowback from that explosion. And then they said it went dark. And that was when finally people arrived to try and get them out to safety.

Some very emotional people coming up through there crying. One man describes a woman weeping, saying that she had seen bodies down there as she was being evacuated. The death toll in that train station attack, it still stands at 11, but 55 injured, many of them believed to be critically injured and authorities tell us to expect that that toll will continue to rise, Chris.

[08:35:18] CUOMO: I mean even those considered lucky in these situations have to deal with the worst often that they'll ever see in their lives. And again, they are the lucky ones. We are hearing word, though, of this being coordinated. And when authorities say that, that means they don't know how many people are involved and that, of course, leads to the information you're delivering right now, the reports that there are ongoing secondary investigations to figure out what's going on. The learning curve after Paris is that often it's not just those who detonate themselves, but others who help them achieve that horrible end.

ELBAGIR: Absolutely. And they're also dealing with the reality of how Brussels has essentially become ground zero to these interlocking lattice works of radical networks. And they perhaps might not be working on all the same operations at the same time. But there is definitely a kind of movement within these networks. And so not only are you looking at active investigations that you need to maintain your attention on even while you're looking at new files like this, like the operation that they're launching today to try and clean up what remains potentially of these networks out there.

So far they've confirmed that they believe one of the explosions here at the airport was a suicide attack. It's still unclear what caused the second explosion in this attack. But they are working very hard to close in on that network. They also, as we've been reporting, Chris, state media are reporting that they have evacuated the royal palace, they've evacuated the royal family because of suspected packages.

Back to you, Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Oh, Nima, thank you very much.

We want to go now to our terrorism expert, Paul Cruickshank, who has been working his sources and he has some new reporting for us.

Paul, what have you learned?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Our colleagues at FTF (ph), the Belgium public broadcaster, have just reported that police are in an active manhunt in Brussels right now for individuals they believe are linked to today's attack. That there are police patrols that have also been given information about the suspects. There is a large manhunt going on in Brussels right now to try and apprehend the other members of this attack cell still at large.

That indicates that Belgium investigators have some sense of who is behind this. Certainly that they suspect it's a particular group of individuals. And as we all look at this, I think many of us have thought likely that this is the same network carrying out this attack as carried out the attack in Paris, the Salah Abdeslam network. When Belgian police, last week, exactly a week ago, went into Salah Abdeslam's safe house, his long-term hiding place in the Fire (ph) district in Brussels, they found explosive detonators. They found a Kalashnikov, an ISIS flag, ammunition. All suggesting that some kind of plot was in the works. They are trying to wrap up the network they believe is behind these attacks right now before they could strike again. These are very dangerous hours ahead in Brussels rights now.

CAMEROTA: Paul, I have a couple more questions for you before we bring back the panel because I'm just reading this alert that the federal prosecutor in Brussels is asking journalists not to repeat information about the investigation underway. Obviously you're not doing that. It sound as though there are some specific addresses or some specific details that they are asking the media to keep quiet on because they don't, obviously, want to obscure or in any way ruin the investigation that's underway. But are you hearing that it is that same Molenbeek neighborhood that we know has been responsible and where Abdeslam was captured?

CRUICKSHANK: We don't know exactly where these police searches are going on, but this is a huge manhunt in Brussels right. Now the entire security apparatus of Brussels has been mobilized to catch the associates of those who just carried out the worst terrorist attack in the modern history of Belgium.

CAMEROTA: And, Paul, just to remind our viewers, this is where you grew up. This is your neighborhood. This was the subway stop that you took. Can you tell us what - what this neighborhood like today?

CRUICKSHANK: Yes, the Maelbeek subway stop in Brussels is right underneath the European Parliament, right underneath the institutions, the - that a minister of the European Union. This is a very symbolic target for whichever terrorist group is behind it that presumably - I mean the working theory right now is this is an ISIS terrorist attack, not a lone wolf terrorist attack, but an ISIS terrorist attack.

[08:40:08] When you look at this sort of explosives that may have been used to create that amount of power, that amount of casualty count, fatalities at the airport, at the - at the subway stop, you're really looking more an ISIS plot. But, yes, Maelbeek is a metro station right in the heart of Brussels, used by hundreds and hundreds of commuters. This appears to have been during a very busy part of the morning commute. Timed to create presumably maximum loss of life. So this is the heart of Europe being targeted now by ISIS. The heart of Brussels, the heart of Belgium.

And also at the airport, a very international target. A very modern airport, Zaventem, just outside Brussels. An international target to amplify this attack in terms of its impact around the world.

And I can tell you just, you know, I grew up in Belgium. I was born there in Brussels. Spent a lot of time there every year. There's going to be a lot of shock today, but there was resignation that this sort of thing was going to happen. Because in May of 2014, we saw a deadly attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels by a French ISIS recruit who had come back, probably launched the attack on his own it seemed but he had come back to Belgium to launch that attack. And then since then there's just been a steady drumbeat of terror threats to Belgium. We saw in January of last year a major gun and bomb plot thwarted by the same cell, essentially the same network that carried out the Paris attacks in Belgium. There was a big gunfight in (INAUDIBLE), in eastern Belgium, which thwarted that attack.

But then fast forward to the summer, there was that train - remember that fast speed train traveling from Amsterdam through Brussels on the way to Paris just near the Belgium/French border. A gunman called al Khazzani (ph), who had been spending time in Brussels, In Molenbeek, tried to kill as many people as he could on that train, but it was the heroic intervention of three Americans which stopped terrible bloodshed on the that day on the train.

And then, of course, the Paris attacks themselves. They were the work of a cell based in Belgium. And even, more recently, we had a maximum terror alert that came out a week after those attacks because there was a message intercepted on a cell phone suggesting an attack was in the works.

And then just over the Christmas and New Year period, they canceled the new year fireworks because there was an ISIS- inspired biker gang who were planning on caring an attack in Brussels at that time. So this is not a surprise, but it will be shocking nonetheless.

PEREIRA: But, OK, given the fact that you have just painted a really grim picture of the situation in Belgium. Give me a sense of the people that you talked to, the people you know there, are they living with this - this oppression, this fear that these strikes or an attack is imminent, are they sort of resolute in trying to maintain life as usual?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, there's - there's a certain amount of resilience. People go on with their - their daily lives. Some of the older generations have, you know, bad memories of German occupation - occupation by the Nazis during - during World War II. So, you know, the people have a lot of resilience in that country.

But people are fearful as well. They - how can you go on with your daily routine, your daily lives if you don't know if you're going to come back at the end of the day. And the Belgium prime minister, Charles Michel, has really addressed this. He said, this is a new reality we are now living in Europe. This is the new normal.

I talk to security officials in Belgium all the time. They've never been so overstretched. They just don't have the resources that the Americans or even a country like Britain or France has. They have a small police service. They don't have the technical means. They're working around the clock to try and protect their own people. But the scale of this threat is just too big for them right now. There are too many Belgians. I mean the official count, more than 300, who have traveled to Syria and Iraq. Half of whom have come back. The numbers may be significantly larger than that. They don't have the resources to watch all these people around the clock.

To give you some idea, just to watch one or two people around the clock, you need dozens and dozens, perhaps even a hundred police officers and support team. And there are -

PEREIRA: I was going to say (INAUDIBLE) -

CRUICKSHANK: Dozens of these suspects that they need to watch. So - so this is a very worrying time indeed.

CAMEROTA: Michael, I want to ask you about the targets today. Obviously the airport. That's always a favorite target of terrorists.

MICHAEL WEISS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes.

CAMEROTA: There are all sorts of people from all sorts of nationalities going through there. That was at 8:00 a.m. Obviously a very busy time. Then an hour later, this subway stop, as we've just heard Paul outline, this was during rush hour. And the location of it near the American embassy -

[08:45:07] WEISS: Yes.

CAMEROTA: As well as near all sort of E.U. government buildings. So they choose - terrorists choose targets of opportunity, but they also choose symbols.

WEISS: Yes, but also, I mean, if you are mapping this out, you think I'm going to hit an airport, that means I'm going to hit not just people from one country, but people from many countries. And for ISIS, again, it's bringing the war home. It's striking within those countries when they kill citizens of those -- I mean, so they just killed an Iranian, and an Israeli and an American in Istanbul. God knows how many foreign nationals they have killed at the airport.

Striking at a subway terminal that's right below a major European institution, who might you have gotten then? EU officials, bureaucrats, people who are known to the world. They consider this a global war. You know, they -- Again, they want to turn the streets of Paris, the streets of Brussels and if they had it their way, the streets of Washington and New York into the Allah province (inaudible).

This constant high frequency waging of opportunistic spectaculars, also small scale. Gun and bomb attacks but sometimes just gun attacks or sometimes stabbings. You know, Paul gave you almost half a dozen operations that have been planned -- some interrupted, thankfully so, but some of them successful -- basically in one country in Europe in the last year and change. I mean, if you do account between 2015 and 2016, you know, Turkey has sustained the worst and the most number of ISIS-inspired attacks.

And one of the things that doesn't get remarked upon enough, you know, ISIS, they are not particularly great at fighting in a conventional military sense. We've inflated their grandeur because of their ability to (inaudible) provincial capitals in the Middle East. What they are really good at is trade craft. Intelligence operations.

You know, when Abdel-Hamid Abu Oud gave an interview to "Dabiq" before the Paris attacks, he made a point to emphasize that it's actually quite easy to slip these European dragnets. He said that, you know, some European counterterrorism police stopped my car when I was -- There was an international manhunt for me underway in the continent. Stopped my car. I gave them a fake ID and by Allah's grace I managed to deceive the infidel and get away. They're trying to convince people this is actually quite easy to do. It's quite easy to link up and to get recruited.

The other thing is they have a geopolitical savvy. This is not to give them too much credit, but one of their -- the main planks of their propaganda and indeed their operational history is to try and drive a wedge in the coalition or in between the countries that are ranged against -- in this war against them.

So for instance, most of the targets in Turkey they've struck are Kurdish targets. They're not just Kurdish targets, but Kurdish targets that are affiliated with the PKK or the Kurdish workers party, which is essentially America's only ground force in Northern Syria that's been taking the fight to ISIS. And they do this very purposefully because they know Kurds in Turkey are going to direct their (inaudible) -- not so much even at ISIS -- but at the Turkish government of (inaudible). And this is going to weaken NATO, it's going to weaken the international resolve and this coalition essentially is going to fray and crumble.

When they burnt the Jordanian airmen alive, you know, there was this big, you know, sort of -- King Abdullah almost on the cover of "Esquire" looking like he's going to wage aerial (ph) (inaudible) himself. As of today, the Jordanian air force is not bombing ISIS at all. They kind of dropped out of the coalition in all but name.

PEREIRA: I want to turn things back sort of state side because that's obviously a concern. We have Peter Bergen with us. We also have Deb Feyerick here. And obviously when we see something like this happen in a major international city, it reminds us of terrible things that have happened on our own soil and we know that U.S. officials and, specifically some of the big city officials, are really taking a look at what they can be doing. What are you hearing from that?

DEB FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. Clearly they are treating this very seriously because if it happened there, the concern is that perhaps it can happen here. There is a nexus -- I'm sorry -- the NYPD saying there is no nexus that they know of, but they are deploying their counterterrorism teams. They are deploying a lot of very heavily armed people around the city and at strategic points like at the subway, even though there is no known threat. They are doing that protectively.

You've got the port authority, which handles a lot of the airports, they're also deploying a lot more manpower. We're talking uniformed and plainclothes officers. They're going to be not only inside facilities, they're also going to be at the perimeter, sort of extra eyes watching that. And you've also got extra security at Penn Station.

But you know, it was very interesting, you know, just to refer to what Paul said, you know, I've been to Zaventem airport many times and I actually have a cousin there and I just spoke to her and I asked her what was going on. She said that she had a colleague who was traveling from Paris into Brussels for a meeting, another one driving and they are both completely stuck. They cannot get into Belgium because of what's going on. And so this has clearly disrupted the entire course of the day. The

security at Zaventem, when you walk in, it is a huge terminal and you've got -- you look at a big board and you are directed to one or more departure gates where you can check in. And so it is an incredibly vulnerable area. And I've always said that. When I go through the airport with my family, I'm always like move it along, move it along, move it along, because there isn't that kind of security. Once I get through the checkpoint then I feel fine.

[08:50:11] But you really understand that depending on where they walk in, and investigators are looking at which area they targeted -- There has been some discussion in the Belgian media that they were at an area that has a lot of American airlines. So they are looking to see whether, in fact, they targeted a specific group of planes. Because that's how they do it with Delta and American and all the others. But there is a lot of concern and clearly a lot of fear right now in terms of what's going on there.

PEREIRA: Sure.

CAMEROTA: Let's bring Peter Bergen in and talk to him about that because Peter, obviously after 9/11 airline security was beefed up extraordinarily. We all take our shoes off. We go through much longer lines. But not airport security necessarily. And so there is still that soft target before you get through the magnetometers or the metal detectors that is still open.

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yeah, but you know, if you want to basically close down all airport/aircraft travel you would set up a system where you would all have to go through security to even get in the airport. I just don't think that's tenable. You know -- So unfortunately, you know, you can do some things like prevent people from parking cars that may have bombs outside the airport. You know, most airports have instituted that. But we are not going to fundamentally change the way we do air travel because the global economy would simply collapse in the absence of what is, after all, the bloodstream of the global economy. So I think the idea that you would just simply turn airports into sort of de facto prisons that would -- that are very hard to enter -- is just not feasible, I don't think.

PEREIRA: Well -- And let's speak to the other aspect of this. The metro bombing. Fifteen killed and 130 -- pardon me. Fifteen wounded and dozens more wounded at this metro station. And you can speak to the fact that that is a completely untenable soft target when you think that maybe there is a turnstile that prevents a person from not paying, but that is really the only kind of security measure that a lot of these subway systems and metro systems around the world are conducted.

BERGEN: Yeah, again, I mean, you know, when you are talking about transportation systems where millions of people are using them every day, which is true of every European city, you are not going to be able to search everybody who comes in. That said, there are sort of intelligent camera devices that are increasingly being deployed. So for instance an intelligent camera might detect if somebody put a briefcase down in a place that didn't make a lot of sense. And so there are some sort of technical solutions to this. We have Evan Perez's reporting that it is possible that a suitcase bomb was deployed at Brussels. There are some technical ways of getting at that issue about people leaving things in places that camera can detect. But you are not going to be able to search everybody who goes into an airport, everybody who goes into a train station. That is just not feasible.

CAMEROTA: Very quickly, Paul, I know you have some new reporting that you want to share.

CRUICKSHANK: Well, just extra thought on Zaventem airport, the international airport. And ever since the Paris attacks, they have massively stepped up security there at the airport, outside the airport on the pavements, as people drop people off there are soldiers with very, very heavy automatic weapons. There are a lot of police patrols -- that patrols. This was a hard target. This wasn't a soft target, even though they didn't get through security, this was one of the most well-protected sites in Europe. And just think about that. It appears ISIS got through.

CAMEROTA: Panel, thank you very much for your expertise. Great to have you on hand. Let's go back to Chris.

CUOMO: We're getting more reporting about the situation. So let's go to Nick Robertson. Nick, we're hearing that authorities say they found a weapon by one of the believed attackers inside the airport. What do you know?

NICK ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: There were reports of shots fired at the airport during that period of confusion with the suicide bomber detonating his explosives. And what we are now beginning to learn is another line of inquiry that a suitcase at the airport perhaps contained the other explosives. It is not clear if the suicide bomber had the weapon, if the weapon was discarded by somebody else at the airport, but there are reports of that gunshots fired.

This would certainly fit the image of the scenario that is being built here. There are similarities here to the Paris attack. There are similarities to try and to strike a soft target easily and quickly. So this is beginning to fit the profile as attention turns and quite obviously focuses on an ISIS type of attack. This is another indicator that this was potentially an ISIS attack.

[08:55:01] We know that the ISIS cells that have been disrupted in Brussels over the past week or so that Kalashnikov weapons had been found there when the police raided a house last Tuesday in the suburbs of Paris -- in the suburbs of Brussels, rather. Three police officers were injured and a fourth later on when somebody in that building opened fire with an automatic Kalashnikov weapon, fired about 30 rounds. The attacker was shot dead by a police sniper at the time. But certainly the indications on this understanding is that ISIS does have those weapons in Brussels. This begins to add more detail to that picture, Chris. CUOMO: All right, Nick, thank you very much. And of course, you are

in London, which has also been responsive to this situation. They are asking for any information or video that shows who may have been involved here to be sent to them showing, again, how what happens in one place in Europe and beyond effects everywhere. Nick Robertson, thank you very much.

For those of us covering on NEW DAY and in New York and around the world, we are going to continue our coverage of what happened in Belgium this morning. Again, dozens killed at an airport and a metro station. Many, many more terribly injured. The situation still developing. CNN is going to have complete coverage that continues right after the break. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Thanks very much for joining us. I'm Anderson Cooper. Welcome to our viewers watching in the United States and around the world.

Right now cities around the world are on alert after terrorists strike a major European capital.