At 8am two bombs were detonated at Brussels Airport in Zaventem, killing 14 people and injuring more than 100. According to local governor Lodewijk De Witte, “three bombs were brought inside” the airport, but one “did not go off”. The third bomb was found and neutralised. The airport cancelled all flights through Wednesday.

At 9am a second attack struck the metro station in the Brussels district of Maelbeek, home to the European Union, the European Commission and the NATO headquarters. Some 20 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Public transport was severely affected and only began to partially normalise in the late afternoon.

Shortly after the blasts, the Belgian police launched a largescale manhunt, and appealed for information regarding a man pictured on CCTV footage with two other men believed to be the assailants. The trio are seen in the airport footage pushing trolleys loaded with bags. Two of the men are wearing one glove each, leading the authorities to believe they were obscuring detonators.

Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frédéric Van Leeuw, announced that the two gloved men “probably committed suicide attacks” and had most likely been killed in the blasts. The third man, wearing a jacket, light-coloured shirt, glasses and a black hat, was “actively being sought,” Van Leeuw said.

Police were going “door-to-door in various places across the country,” searching for suspects or others believed to be planning attacks, Van Leeuw said. The interior minister said 600 additional police were deployed.

FRANCE 24 correspondent Kattalin Landaburu said that some of the searches were taking place in the north of the capital, in the districts of Jette and Schaerbeek. The authorities later said that an explosive device, chemical products and an Islamic State flag had been found in an apartment in Schaerbeek. Landaburu said that a hazmat team had been seen entering the apartment block.

Too soon to link to Paris attacks

The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for the attacks, which are the bloodiest Brussels has ever seen.

Experts say that the attacks show an alarming resilience by the IS network to plot and carry out acts of mass terror despite international efforts to target the group.

Often considered a sanctuary for radical Islamists, Brussels had long avoided a large-scale terror attack like those that struck Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, and Paris in 2015.

The attacks come just four days after the capture of Frenchman Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving assailant of the Paris attacks of November 2015, in which 130 people were killed. Abdeslam was apprehended in a Brussels apartment on Friday and is being questioned in the Belgian city of Bruges ahead of being extradited to France.

While many commentators have rushed to connect Tuesday’s attacks with the horror that struck Paris in November, Van Leeuw said it was “too early to establish a link with the Paris attacks”.

Investigators will examine the explosives used on Tuesday to see if they bear the same characteristics to those used in the Paris attacks.

Attack feared but ‘no information’

Belgium’s interior minister said authorities knew that some kind of extremist act was being prepared in Europe but that they were surprised by the scale of the attacks. Interior Minister Jan Jambon said “it was always possible that more attacks could happen but we never could have imagined something of this scale”.

Jambon told RTL television that “we had no information about this, but we know that things were moving in Europe, in different countries, in France, in Germany, here”.

The IS group issued an updated communiqué late on Tuesday threatening other countries taking part in the anti-IS coalition.

The statement promised “dark days” for countries allied against the group, threatening “what is coming is worse and more bitter”.

The FBI and New York police said on Tuesday they are sending detectives to investigate the attacks because US citizens are among the casualties.

The UN Security Council strongly condemned the attacks and urged intensified regional and international efforts “to overcome terrorism and violent extremism”.