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The 2 suicide bombers who attacked Brussels airport have been identified

Mar 23, 2016, 12:58 IST

The suicide bombers who carried out the attack on Brussels airport were brothers and known to the authorities, Belgian media reports.

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The pair have been named as Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui. Sky News reports that Khalid had rented a property under an alias the house which was raided by police in the Brussels suburb of Forest last week.

CCTV/Belgium Police

Belgium is in three days of mourning after the Tuesday's attacks in Brussels left 34 people dead and around 250 wounded.

The government said there would be a minute's silence for the victims at 12.00 p.m. CET (11:00 GMT) to remember those who were killed after explosions ripped through Brussels-Zaventem Airport and a metro station in Brussels on Tuesday morning.

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The Islamic State - also known as ISIS, Daesh and ISIL - has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Belgian Federal Police are still searching for a lead suspect (on the right in this photo) in the bombings after it released an image captured from airport-security footage of three men suspected to be involved in the bombings:

There were two explosions that happened in quick succession in Brussels Airport shortly after 8 a.m. CET (7 a.m. GMT). Belgian police are presuming that the two men to the left in this photo are dead after detonating suicide devices.

Police are still looking for the man on the right. Authorities are speculating the the suitcase he was pushing on the trolley contained a bomb but it failed to explode.

However, Belgian police located a taxi driver who allegedly drove the three suspects to the airport. He gave the police an address in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels where he picked up the men and authorities allegedly found another explosive device and an ISIS flag.

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The attacks came days after Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in last year's Paris attacks, was arrested in the Belgian capital, the de-facto capital of the EU.

Belgian officials have long been aware of the existence of an ISIS-linked terrorist cell in Brussels, believed to be centered in the district of Molenbeek.

Belgium's interior minister, Jan Jambon, has called Molenbeek "the capital of political Islam in continental Europe," and several suspects have been arrested there in connection with November's Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

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