Brussels was hit by horrific bombings this morning. There were two explosions at the airport and one on a major subway station. At least thirty people are dead and around 170 are injured. The entire city is on lockdown.
Belgian federal Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw has said that it is too early to get an exact number on how many people were killed. Different news outlets are reporting different numbers.
The airport has been evacuated and the entire city subway system has been shut down. The terror threat level has been raised to four (the highest).
Other European countries have beefed up security measures in airports. The Washington D.C. metro system is increasing K9 sweeps and police patrols. The President is still in Cuba, but he has been briefed about the attacks.
The Start Of The Attack
The airport explosion happened around 8 a.m. local time. There were hundreds of people there. Both blasts blew out windows and parts of the ceiling caved in.
About an hour later (the end of rush hour), the subway blast went off at the Maalbeek station. Belgian troops came in and led people out of the metro by walking along the tracks.s
Kristalina Georgieva, the vice president of the European Commission, has raised their threat level to orange and all meetings there have been cancelled.
On Friday, one of the suspects in the Paris attack, Salah Abdeslam, was arrested in a suburb of Brussels. Authorities say it is too early to tell if these two events are related. But, the suspect did say that he was planning to “restart something.”
The Belgian prime minister said he doesn’t know who is responsible. They are just trying to care for the victims now. Here is some of the footage from the airport:
Featured image via Twitter.
