The NYPD – and not the FBI — provided critical information to its Netherland counterparts about the two Brussels suicide bombers that had been overlooked before the deadly terror attack, according to reports.
On Tuesday, Dutch Justice minister Ard van der Steur wrote a letter to the lower house of the Dutch Parliament saying that the FBI had informed the Netherlands about the criminal backgrounds of ISIS-affiliated siblings Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Khalid El Bakraoui on March 16, the NL Times reported.
Then, on Wednesday, Van der Steur changed his tune in a second letter he sent to parliament, admitting that he had made “an error” in giving credit to the FBI – and then praised the NYPD for giving the heads up, the news site said.
“The Dutch liaison at the embassy in Washington received the message from another big American investigative authority, namely the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department,” Van der Steur wrote in the second letter.
“As usual, the liaison forwarded this information to the National Police without specifying the origin. It was then assumed in the Netherlands that the information came from the FBI,” the letter said.
Van der Steur noted that that he plans to grill the NYPD over why the information was only sent to the Dutch authorities, excluding the Belgium federal police, which is investigating the Brussels attack.
More than 30 people were killed and over 300 injured in three coordinated bombings on March 22 at the Brussels Airport and the Maalbeek metro station near the European Union.
Under international pressure over a series of missed clues about jihadist networks, the Belgian government has admitted mistakes were made in thwarting terrorist attacks, the site said.
Van der Steur was ridiculed for his blunder by his fellow politicians.
“What a fumbling again,” Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders wrote on Twitter.
This is a painful mistake by Van der Steur”, Jesse Klaver., the head of Netherlands-based political party GroenLinks, told a news agency. “It is also painful that we apparently have to get information on a Belgian terrorist possibly staying in our country via the police in New York.”