Islamic State has published obituaries of the suicide bombers who killed 32 people in Brussels, confirming investigators' suspicions of close links to the November Paris attacks.
One of the attackers made explosives for the Paris attacks and two others are credited by Islamic State with lead roles in organising them.
The article in the latest issue of the group's online magazine, Dabiq, was published on Wednesday and also credited the other two, the Belgian El Bakraoui brothers, with a lead role in organising the Paris attacks.
Warning of more operations to come, it said: "Brussels, the heart of Europe, has been struck."
Najim Laachraoui, a 25-year-old Belgian who blew himself up at Brussels airport on March 22, had "travelled the long road to France" after fighting in Syria since 2013.
"It was Abu Idris who prepared the explosives for the two raids in Paris and Brussels," it added, using Laachraoui's nom de guerre and calling him "very intelligent".
Investigators have suspected former engineering student was the cell's bomb-maker.
His fingerprints were found on suicide vests used in Paris on November 13 and at a Brussels apartment where militants had made a homemade explosive known as TATP.
It was from there that he and two other men took a taxi to the airport.
One of them was the other airport suicide bomber, Brahim El Bakraoui, 29, an armed robber on parole.
Dabiq said had become a believer while in prison and on his release, with his brother Khalid, had bought weapons and made plans for an attack.
Khalid El Bakraoui, 27, who blew himself up on a metro train at Maelbeek station in Brussels' EU district, also took up the cause in prison, the article said, describing him as a "natural leader" who had a "vivid, life-changing dream" while jailed for a carjacking.
"All preparations for the raids in Paris and Brussels started with him and his older brother," Dabiq said.
"These two brothers gathered the weapons and the explosives. After the blessed raid in Paris, he saw another dream, which motivated him to carry out an istishhadi (martyrdom) operation."
Along with notes on the three suicide bombers, Dabiq published an account of Mohamed Belkaid, a 35-year-old Algerian, who was shot dead by police on March 15 in a raid on an apartment in the Brussels suburb of Forest.
Belkaid had reached Europe from Syria with Laachraoui, the article said, confirming investigators' conclusions that the two men travelled together posing as Syrian refugees last summer and were driven to Belgium by Salah Abdeslam, a prime suspect in the Paris attacks who was arrested three days after the Forest raid.
Reuters
