another explosion. now, we know for sure there's been an explosion at one metro station. there's a possibility there might have been other explosions. but for sure at one metro station in the same district, this station is located in the same district as eu headquarters. the airport is locked down. all public transportation is locked down in brussels. there will be no flights coming in and out. all flights are being diverted. and people in the city have been told to stay put. stay home if they have not gone out for the day yet, and stay put. essentially we're looking at a city that is frozen, that is essentially on lockdown until authorities can figure out if the threat has passed or if there's a possibility of more explosions. so i know that charlie d'agata, we had spent the morning -- we don't have charlie. charlie had spent the morning trying to make it to the airport. he managed to get there not too

he described it, by some very burly police officers who warned him that there's no way he can get closer to the airport than he had been, even with a press pass because there was a concern that there may be more bombs. the news that we're getting is that at the airport, at least one of the explosions was the result of a suicide bomber. there are crowds and crowds of people who were expected to get on flights who have now left the airport, still milling about. if there's another suicide bomber in that mix, authorities have got to be concerned about that as well. and this is -- can only be described as a very well-organized attack that happened just hours from each other in the same location. it reminds us a lot of the attack that happened in paris. >> anne-marie, we're getting word that ten people may have been killed in an explosion on that metro train in brussels, according to the belgian broadcaster vtn. they're not giving any more details.

people possibly killed in that explosion on a metro train. we've got ryan heath. he is a senior correspondent with politico on the phone joining us right now. ryan, we were talking about the difficulties in belgian police, trying to coordinate efforts because of the multiple language spoken within that country. what do you know about the coordinated efforts to root out terror cells with other eu countries? for example, france which is right next door which suffered those horrific attacks back on november 13th that killed 130 people? what kind of coordination can we expect to see with france, with germany, with other countries surrounding belgium and afar? >> the cooperation has clearly ramped up, and i think that that is the case since literally the day after the paris attacks. france and belgium are in daily contact. and i would presume much more than daily contact, to be honest. because there are too many leads to follow and not enough people to follow them. but this is one of the

environment like the european union versus a single country like the united states where obviously each individual country guards its own sovereignty, and they would like to share information, but they only share information with people they truly trust. it's not a case of automatic sharing of all information at all levels. you have databases that don't always match up with each other. and then you just have different problems like the 24 languages that people speak in the eu. and so that slows down the ability to exchange and use information. and then you get to the other practical problem where you have a situation where police were not able to speak one of the dialects that the terror cell was apparently organizing in some of the parts of brussels. and so that hampered their ability to even realize that something was being planned because they weren't able to literally understand some of the communication that was taking place. >> yeah. in fact -- >> reporter: multiple layers of complication. >> when we spoke to the head of

mollenbeck, he even himself pointed out that they, the police, have difficulties in rooting out these terror cells because they don't have any officers who speak arabic. they only have a couple of officers who can speak arabic. so it makes it even more difficult to try and figure out who's doing what, what kind of communications they're using because you have people that are not familiar with the language of those terrorists. >> right. and ryan just brought up not just arabic but then a particular dialect within that. you know, ryan, vlad has done some reporting from mollenbeck. he was there last year. i'm wondering if you've been to the area, and from both of you, actually, if you've reported down there, what's the feeling that you get down there? do you feel safe? do you feel, you know, as an outsider, we have a certain idea of what these neighborhoods are like. >> yes. so i literally, a little bit like sarah palin, i can see mollenbeck from my window. he actually headed down there on

i think there is a sense of weariness in the neighborhood because it's obvious that the majority of people aren't themselves radical or a direct threat. they know there are people amongst them, who if they are not the radicals or terror cells do lend some kind of support or sort of close in around those people to blend in and hide and people like salah to sort of take cover for even months at a time there. so i think it's a real mix in that suburb. you have people who moved there because they wanted to pick up a cheap property that could rise in value. so you've got these young professionals. you've got these sort of rather rich couples who are there to sort of score a bargain on the property market. you've got people who are there because there's no where else for them to go because they can only stay, and the other people who speak the language of the country they've come from or because they need to cram into an accommodation and sort of

you've got a situation where you sort of have big-box stores. you have sort of not quite an ikea but big furniture stores, big supermarkets out there. you have a big swimming pool and a big park. so you have lots of people coming and going in the area. it's not sort of the case that you can sort of get to play one label or one feeling to the whole area. but you definitely get the sense that you move somewhere different when you cross the canal that sends you into that area. so if you're standing on my street, you'd see sort of the general high-street fashion stores that you would see down on main street in an american city about and it feels like quite a western place. you cross the canal, and it's not the same anymore. like you have very particular sets of bakeries and butchers. you have the cafes that tend to be very male dominated. obviously, people speak arabic in the streets, and there's a lot of signage in non-french, non-dutch and also non-english languages there.

different feel when you go into mollenbeck mollenbeck, but it's not one black and white image or one black and white feeling. it's a real mix. moment. we want to bring in elizabeth palmer, our correspondent, who has covered the paris attacks extensively. all right. so ryan, going back to your point, and this is a point that we want to make as we look at these images. we also understand the news just in now that the euro star has canceled trains into belgium. and i'm not sure if that includes all euro star trains, even the ones going from london to paris. at least as far as we can tell, trains coming -- or leaving brussels are canceled right now of the euro star. so international travel there. ryan, the question about the mollenbeck neighborhood, that's something that i was -- you pointed out when i got into the heart of mollenbeck, there was a very different vibe there. there was a very different feeling once you crossed that

understandably people were tense and nervous with a city that was under lockdown after the paris attacks. but still, i felt very different in mollenbeck than i did when we were trying to figure out the root causes of terrorism. for example, in some of the surrounding areas in paris. a very different vibe in paris vis-a-vis what i saw in mollenbeck. and clearly, when you have the mayor of mollenbeck saying that she really doesn't have any control over the investigations that are being done into the terror cells in her neighborhood, that is a problem because there are a lot of people that are still perhaps in that neighborhood while you point out the majority of them are law-abiding people, there is seriously a problem going on there, and they haven't figured out how to root it out. >> yeah, there is a competence problem at the local level, not just in mollenbeck but probably in other areas of belgium as well. and the moment i say that either in my own column or if i come on a show like yours, belgian media

come down on me like a ton of bricks because they feel that's belgium bashing. you do have to wonder when you know that a large percentage of your population is coming from another country where there are arabic speakers and you don't have arabic-speaking police officers, then you have a system problem. and that's something that belgium is going to have to reckon with. the local mayor, i fully accept, as a resident and as a neutral journalist observing the situation, that she's not in control of an international intelligence network. and she can't root those terrorists out of their homes. but when you know there are 95 trained radicals that are living in your neighborhood and you've been given the list by those intelligence authorities and you are from the same party as the national prime minister, if you haven't come up with a plan of what you're going to do about it, it comes across as rather weak governance to almost anyone who's looking at that objectively. and i think the more these incidents continue to happen,

going to accept that response from their local officials. and i don't know whether that's going to really jolt the system and force those individuals to leave their positions or force a different set of rules and way that the levels of government relate to each other. but obviously the pressure will increase, the more local populations come under this pressure. people won't be happy going into lockdown mode every few months because the system can't get its act together. >> ryan, it also strikes me interesting that france, for example, which has had multiple terror threats before friday the 13th of november in 2015, france has dealt with terrorism a number of times. and i want your take on it as somebody who lives in belgium. it almost seemed when brussels was under lockdown, that they were reeling from what had happened in france, whereas france pretty much oeched up, although the country was under a state of emergency, paris was not under lockdown. paris was continuing as usual.

pride for the french people that they were going to continue to go to work and use the metro system. whereas in brussels we saw a very different reaction. we saw a city under full lockdown where things were not moving. and i wonder if that is because, as you point out, i'm focusing on the point that you just made, not that authorities have their head in the sand. they just don't know how to deal with this terror threat. >> yeah, i think it really came across the sort of reports i was hearing from one of your reporters just before i joined the show where it was the look of confusion and surprise on the face of the police officer when he was confronting them about why he couldn't get into the parmt airport. and i've come across a lot of that as well. i've obviously been hearing from friends on facebook and other platforms this morning about what they've been changing for their daily schedule and how it's been affecting them, and you just get so many different reactions. so one of my friends is stuck in a bank branch. and she's clearly being told on television don't move anywhere. and then the bank branch officers are saying no worries. leave the bank.

and when you get this sort of level of contradictory messages and lack of preparedness, i think that adds to the sense of confusion and the belief that you can't necessarily trust what the authorities are telling you. and that really makes it difficult to operate with confidence when you face a major threat like this because you don't know who to believe. and you yourself haven't been trained in how to deal with it, then it just leads to a lot of people acting in contradictory ways rather than a society coming together and confronting something in a coherent way. >> and that always comes up when a terror attack like this happens is the refugee crisis that really started to unfold last summer. what has been the attitude in brussels about accepting refugees and that sort of thing when stuff like this starts to unfold? >> this is one of those examples where you see the two layers of brussels operating. so you have the people who live here and don't really interact

system and then, of course, you have that decision-making elite that's fully bound in diplomacy and intergovernment agreement on how to handle these refugees. so i think that's the people of brussels treated in fairly practical terms. they're willing to do their part. i think there are around about 200 refugee centers across belgium that have been receiving people. i've been working with one refugee in particular that had to leave syria. he had to leave his wife and his unborn child behind and never seen his kids. now, in order to make it here and try and establish a foothold in a safe country and get his family out of syria. and so there's thousands and thousands of examples of that operating in a sensible way. people aren't necessarily being embraced by the community. i know that that friend of mine, he has lived about 200 yards from the center of a town just outside of brussels. and the people in the town he says don't seem to really notice

are sort of dumped into this hangar that was next to an industrial park. and they operate safely, and they're warm, and they're fed. but they're not really integrated into the community. then you have the people who are making the big overall decisions on the refugee crisis, and they've been really struggling to come to terms with how do you make governments who don't want to accept refugees into their country, how do you make them be part of a coordinated european union response? how, those ideals written down in the charter of life that in theory apply to everybody in the eu but tend to get shredded when a real crisis like this comes along. so you've got people trying to do the right thing in the eu decision-making system but who are really struggling with how you unite 28 countries to make something happen. and one of the consequences is you resort to measures that are

emotional word to use, but that deal struck in recent days with turkey to try and send back people arriving illegally and open up a legal front door for others from syria to come in. that's a very controversial deal. it's still uncertain whether it meets a bunch of legal tests. but it shows you how far the eu has been pushed to come up with any form of system at all to deal with the situation because all of the normal ways of dealing with it and all the appeals from people's good nature haven't really worked up to this point. >> ryan, i want to reset for our viewers just joining us now and are looking at the images that we're showing right now, reports of explosions at brussels airport where belgian media is are the roing at least 13 people dead, 35 severely injured. another explosion on a metro train in brussels. the belgian broadcaster saying at least ten people killed there. unknown numbers of injuries there. we know that the metro station is not very far from where the european union meets. i want to reset where you are,

twitter feed. and you had a tweet just about a half an hour ago that says the owner of a bar near the eu headquarters has told his staff to get into work today or get fired. i want to know the background behind that story, especially since the government is telling people to stay where they are. >> yeah, that's another example of the sort of contradictory messages. as i understand it, and it's been reported to me by one of the employees of the bar, it's not that i've spoken directly with the bar owner, that it is an irish bar near the eu headquarters. now, there are several bars. that's why i don't want to speculate on the name because probably one of the other bars is doing the writing. it's probably just this one bar that is really putting the pressure on people. i think that this bar owner has spotted a situation where you have literally thousands of people who are unable to move, many of them stuck outside their building but not able to get to their homes in the suburbs around brussels. and so they spot a business opportunity. and they're clearly angling in

out of those people to stop there rather than putting their employees first. so i don't imagine that that is a very common situation. it's certainly not the instructions that we've received at politico where i work. and so we have security instructions come around a couple of hours ago, essentially asking us to put our safety first rather than rush into danger. but there will be situations like that around brussels right now. i know, for example, that a former commissioner of the european union that i worked for at one point, she is visiting brussels today, and she is also stuck in the eu corridor and doesn't really have any way to get out. these 75 now. so she's stuck waiting for her driver to take her home in the afternoon. and there's not really anyone to meet and not really any way to move around easily. so you have a lot of these different situations where people are essentially stranded or pressured in one way or another to act in a given way.

throughout the day, i would say. >> ryan, you know, we were saying that the explosion at the metro station is not too far from eu headquarters. if one was trying to make a statement, a political statement, what would that be by choosing a metro station so close to eu headquarters? >> i think that that is sending the message that -- it is trying to send a message that no one is safe. that we can hit a major target at short notice. either this has been planned over a number of months or it is a reaction potentially to the raids and the arrests that we saw last week, particularly for that terror suspect, salah abdeslam. so actually go into the eu corridor is really saying that they're not afraid to take it to anybody. now, there might be multiple explosions in that eu corridor as well. i don't imagine that it is one

is being targeted. it's not people choosing the parliament over the civil service executive or targeting another part. it seems to be let's just create maximum difficulty possible in that overall area. and then it would be speculation at this point, but you can imagine that it links back to issues like the refugee crisis, like the attitude of european governments towards syria, towards isis and so on. it would be very difficult to pinpoint at this stage exactly what's driven us because we haven't heard people claim responsibility. but it's not hard to identify the short list of motivations that could have led people towards these acts. ryan, i just want to let our viewers know who may be joining us, a couple of things. now authorities are referring to what is occurring right now in belgium as a terror attack. we also have some information from afp with regards to american airlines. there was some speculation that the explosion at the airport may

american airlines counter. american airlines saying that none of its employees were injured in the explosions that ripped through the airport there. so just updating our viewers here in the united states who may be watching this and wondering about the speculation that this may have happened near the american airlines counter. >> yeah, one of the images i saw was of the check-in section 5. there was an awful lot of damage around that. and that is two to three rows down from american airlines. and sections 4 and 5 are where lufthansa, brussels airlines, and airlines in that star alliance group of airlines tend to be operating. although there is some flexibility in where those check-in desks are located at a given moment. and that area is where people really arriving from the fly section of the airport and coming from the train station underneath. and they pop out in that section, and you've got a starbucks and a samsonite store that are nearby. you've got the information desk of the airport.

area. so if that heavily damaged area is where the bomb went off, the bomber has really targeted the sort of activity well because they've chosen the busiest part of the airport before anyone has had to go through any security screening. >> yeah, and what we've learned so far is at the airport at least one of the explosions was connected to a suicide bomber when we spoke to juan zarate earlier, senior security analyst. we were talking about security at the airport and the fact that you would think at a time like this when a country like belgium is under high alert, one would not be able to walk into an airport and explode a bomb. but this area, this departure area is probably one of the least secure places. and he talked about the fact that most of the security is geared towards protecting the planes and people trying to put an explosive on a plane. so you're talking about an area

gotten out of their car. there would have been children and families and very little in terms of security -- security protections there. >> and what's interesting is that now we'll have to see how airport authorities, government authorities, react to this attack. >> yep. >> are they going to now put into place measures that you see in countries whereby before you even get to the airport, there are security measures in place. in west africa, for example, which i covered for a number of years, there are a number of measures sometimes outside of the airport before you even bring in your luggage into the passenger area into the terminal area to determine whether or not you may be a threat to the passengers within the actual terminal itself. >> right. very similar, i think, in egypt, and i remember being in egypt and the hotels, you couldn't get into the hotel without going through a metal detector first. not just you but also any items you were bringing, any luggage, your purse. they check everything. >> that's right. >> you know, we've, over the

we've seen an increase in security, but it's much more intense in other countries that have been living under this sort of threat for a very long time. >> i just want to update our viewers from our transportation correspondent kris van cleave, he is reporting there is no specific threat in the d.c. area, obviously the capital of the united states, but that police are under -- taking precautions to ensure that nothing happens. but again, no specific or credible threat to the d.c. area. but obviously, security folks beefing up their precautions there on the ground. >> as we know, the airport in brussels is completely shut down, as you can expect. all flights are being diverted. if you were planning on heading that way, if you had a flight that had a stop-over there, definitely check in because things have certainly changed. >> earlier we spoke to our cbs news senior national security analyst, juan zarate, specifically about what is happening in brussels and the larger picture of the terror threat that europe is facing.

>> there's no doubt this is a sophisticated attack. you now have multiple explosions at a major european airport in brussels in the metro system in belgium, and it's paralyzing yet again a major western capital. and so this is a terrible development, of course, and one that, as you were just saying, suggests that belgium has a much deeper problem and one that dates back many years to a deep pocket of radicalization that has emerged in that country, now accelerated by the emergence of the islamic state and manifesting in what has become one of the deadliest attacks on european soil in modern history. >> juan, we're hearing that all public transportation has been shut down right now. we know that the airport has been shut down. flights are being diverted if they were headed towards brussels. you know, this comes at a time,

when the country was already on high alert. we already had news of this high-profile arrest and news that authorities were searching for other suspects, one that was an expert bombmaker. and i think it would come as a surprise, and i'm sure authorities are going to be asked, how, when a country is already on high alert, how were terrorists able to pull these three -- or these three explosions off? does it speak to just how difficult it is to stop this sort of thing? >> it does, unfortunately. it demonstrates not only that these types of attacks are difficult to ferret out and to prevent before they happen, but it does suggest a broader problem that we're having in europe to determine where these cells and networks are emerging and how they're planning and plotting attacks. i think paris was the extreme wake-up call here. we had elements of the islamic

terrorist networks that were mobilized. and we know that many of those networks have preexisted, and we have known that there have been thousands of foreign fighters from the west. in particular from pockets in europe that have been traveling to and from iraq and syria. many of those have been known and tracked. many of them have not. and i think this, again, reflects not only the difficulty of this work but the challenge of the volume of the number of individuals who are part of cells that could prove deadly. and it also underscores the fact that you don't necessarily need thousands to be deployed. if you have a few dozen who are committed with an expert bombmaker in the mix, that can prove strategically incredibly valuable to the terrorists and certainly incredibly deadly to a western capital. and i think that's unfortunately

is embedded with some of these terrorists and radicals. and it's very difficult for european authorities to ferret them out before these kinds of attacks happen. >> juan, you know, when i was talking to charlie d'agata earlier, he said that what struck him was just how successful today's attacks have been, that all three of these bombs went off. and that it's not necessarily always the case, and oftentimes bombmakers are not very skilled at that job. what do you make of just how successful, for lack of a better word, today's attacks have been and the sort of training that this bombmaker would have had to have? >> well, i think there are two troubling elements to the success of the attacks that we were witnessing. one is the fact that you've had these explosions occur and the

devastating. news reports with victims coming out of the scene saying this looked like a war stone. and so these were not just simple pipe bombs or minor bombs. these were significant bombs coordinated in multiple locations. the second part of this that's so dangerous and troubling is the synchronization of the attacks. the fact that you have them in major centers of activity, commercially in terms of transport, and the fact that it's so well coordinated and effective. and so the fact that the bombs were deadly and the fact that they were synchronized in a major european capital that, again, is incredibly troubling, and we're witnessing the effects of it. >> yeah that's what people said was significant about the paris attacks, that it spoke to a

the style of terror attacks, that it was so coordinated that authorities were kept on their toes when they ran to one explosion, then another one happened. >> it's almost as if you watch one attack and then you wait one moment before you launch another one. juan, i guess the question i have from report s s coming in as we show images of the scene from brussels and around the city, in your information and i'm asking you to speculate a little bit, and alsonalysis, would this be in retaliation of the arrest of abdeslam because we know he was planning something else or is it because it was already in the works and it was an attempt to strike back after his arrest?

attacks that were already preplanned, that they were likely under way or at least could be taken off the shelf and implemented and deployed and that it's less about retaliation, although that may be part of a motivation here and more part of an opportunity and realization that the networks and plots were exposed now that these arrests had happened, that authorities may have found ways to then arrest or disrupt these networks, and so rather than have that happen, these plotters and attackers would then accelerate their attacks. this is obviously something that authorities were worried about. they were worried about the ongoing threats -- the elements of the networks that were still out there, the planning that was happening around abdeslam, but