On Wednesday, the EU assembly released a statement announcing that one of the Daesh terrorists involved in the March 22 Brussels suicide bomb attacks worked as a janitor at the European Parliament six years earlier.
The Brussels attacks left 32 dead and scores injured, leading to a public outcry against Belgium and EU officials for failing to prevent the attack. Officials face increased scrutiny after revelations that not only did the EU security apparatus fail to identify the terrorists and thwart the plot, but the bloc actually employed one of the terrorists.
In 2009 and 2010, "one of the perpetrators of the Brussels terrorist attack worked for a period of one month for a cleaning company which was contracted by the European Parliament at the time," spokesman Jaume Duch Guillot said in a statement.
Another EU official identified the terrorist in question as Najim Laachraoui, a 25-year-old Belgian who prosecutors said blew himself up in the March 22 airport attack. Laachraoui is also suspected of assembling the suicide vests used in the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
Parliament spokesman Guillot said that Laachraoui did not have a criminal record nor display any known extremist tendencies at the time he served as a janitor. As a janitor, Laachraoui possessed keys and unsupervised access to almost every corner of the EU assembly.
