Police officers lay a flower wreath in front of a memorial plaque during a commemoration on the 10th anniversary of the March 22, 2016 Brussels attacks, at Brussels International Airport in Zaventem, Belgium, Sunday, March 22, 2026.
Belgium Sunday marked 10 years since the 2016 jihadist bombings in Brussels, a trauma that still scars the country and that authorities say sharpened focus on intelligence and counterterrorism.
The March 22 attacks claimed by ISIL left 32 people dead and more than 300 wounded, Belgium's worst peacetime massacre.
Survivors, watched on by Prime Minister Bart de Wever, King Phillipe and Queen Mathilde, recounted the harrowing scenes they witnessed that morning, as the remembrance ceremonies began just before 8 a.m. at Brussels Airport in Zaventem.
The proceedings arrived an hour later at the Maelbeek metro station, also targeted in the coordinated suicide blasts that ripped through the Belgian capital, before culminating at a monument in memory of the victims in central Brussels.
The Brussels attacks were the work of the same jihadist cell that struck Paris just months earlier on Nov. 13, 2015, killing 130 people.
Having retreated to Brussels safe houses, the jihadists mounted a hastily organized attack in the days after the March 18 arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the Paris attack group.
On March 22, a Tuesday morning, three suicide bombers detonated their explosives, first at Zaventem and then at a packed metro station close to the seat of EU institutions.
In Belgium, the threat level remains "serious" at three on a scale of four, following an October 2023 attack in Brussels that saw a gunman shoot dead two Swedish football fans before being killed by police.
