According to an Israeli intelligence news website, the Belgian government some weeks ago hired an Israeli security firm to inspect security arrangements at Brussels Airport where two bomb attacks carried out by Islamist terrorists claimed the lives of more than 30 people and injured scores of victims.

DEBKAfile, which provides commentary and analyses on terrorism, intelligence, national security, military and international relations, writes that the security experts, who were asked for advice on improvements, submitted initial recommendations for urgent upgrades.

However those improvements had not been installed by Tuesday, March 22, when the terrorists hit the Brussels airport’s departure hall with their exploding suitcases.

The Israeli firm was apparently not alone in underlining the urgency of security upgrades at Zaventem airport in recent weeks.

On February. 29, European Union security agencies called for an immediate overhaul of the security measures at Belgian airports and borders, which were wide open to access by terrorists and lacked the tools for inspecting passengers on arrival and departure.

According to DEBKAfile, not only was Brussels airport wide open to hostile infiltration, so too is Brussels’ second airport in Charleroi, the terminus for charter flights to and from Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey.

Although the Belgian authorities were warned that Charleroi presented Islamic State terrorists with an open door from those countries into Europe, passengers passing through were still not subjected to searches, even when they headed to Zaventem for connecting flights.

The website also notes that both Western and Israeli counterterrorism experts meet with skepticism the stream of reports the Belgian authorities about the identities of the terrorists who struck the airport and the metro station, their numbers and their methods of operation.

‘’Despite the spreading shock effect of the airport attack, it is also becoming clear that the terrorists only accomplished the first part of their jihadist mission,’’ DEBKAfile writes.

It continues, ‘’The Islamic State, which approved the operation, had envisaged a much bigger atrocity. This is attested to by the discovery of three bags containing identical kits of firearms and ammunition, a bomb belt, two AK-47 automatic rifles, magazines and hand grenades – all intact and unused.’’ The police detonated them by controlled explosion.

‘’Those kits were concealed in advance in apparent readiness to strike the emergency teams, the medics, the security forces and the other first responders when they arrived to tend the victims of the first attack. The kits were placed at strategic points, either by an advance team of terrorist operatives masquerading as airport personnel, or a staff employee.’’

‘’When investigators examined the submachine guns, they found that someone had tried to fire one of them and it jammed. This might explain why the second half of the Brussels airport atrocity, the mega-massacre, was stalled,’’ writes DEBKAfile.

‘’By sheer chance, therefore, hundreds of Belgian security officers and emergency aid personnel were saved from being trapped from three directions in a ball of fire.’’