A Peruvian mother says goodbye to her twin 3-year-old girls at the airport. Moments later an explosion rips through the boarding area, and the 36-year-old woman is dead.
Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz was about to catch a flight to New York on Tuesday. The plan was to meet up with her husband and young daughters a few days later for Easter.
But as Ruiz’s young family stepped away from the departure area, she walked into the path of suicide bombers.
Ruiz was the first publicly confirmed victim of the Brussels attacks, one of at least 30 people killed. Hundreds more were wounded.
Two more deaths have now been confirmed.
Belgian law student Leopold Hecht was also killed in the attack, his school, Universite Saint-Louis Bruxelles, said in a statement.
And Olivier Delespesse was killed in the metro explosion, said his employer, La Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles, a government ministry serving Francophone Brussels and Wallonia.
“I wanted to pay tribute to him and to his family and to all the other victims,” said colleague Olivier Dradin in a Facebook tribute to Delespesse.
Desperate search for the missing
While the deceased are named, a desperate search continues for those still missing.
Jonathan Selemani, 25, has been scouring the city’s hospitals looking for his partner and mother of their one-year-old child, Sabrina Esmael Fazal.
Fazal, 24, went missing after taking the metro to her university in the city.
“I saw her in the morning, before she went to school, before she was leaving for class,” said Selemani. “Then when I learned the news I immediately started looking for her. I haven’t found her.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my son.”
As the dust settles, more stories — of carnage and courage — are emerging.
Tales of horror …
Jan Vaes, a military medic with over 20 years experience working in war zones, including Afghanistan, said Tuesday’s attacks were worse than anything he’d ever seen on the job.
“Worse than a war zone,” said the first responder of the scene at Brussels’ airport. “At least in war zones we are in hospitals, we are in treatment facilities.”
“I saw a lot of blood — amputated feet, legs, a lot of burns, a lot of people with holes in their bodies.”
Airport baggage handler Iphonse Lyoura also described a scene from a nightmare.
“There was a woman who couldn’t talk,” he told CNN affiliate BFMTV. “There was a man who had lost his two legs. There was a police officer with a mangled leg.
“It’s horrible. Belgium doesn’t deserve this.”
The hellish site was recounted by another survivor, Giulia Paravinci.
“The man I was talking to said he heard someone screaming something in Arabic, then (nearby) a woman’s leg exploded. Her husband, who was standing next to her, also lost a leg, and a policeman who was running toward them also lost a leg.
“One woman who was holding her baby was screaming, ‘Where’s my baby?’ because she had lost the other one.”
… and tales of survival.
When Thon Hotel manager Hans van der Biesem arrived to work Tuesday morning, he never could have imaged his lobby would soon be filled with dozens of victims escaping the chaos of an explosion at nearby Maelbeek metro station.
Located just 20 meters from the station, Thon Hotel was quickly transformed into a triage center, with medics setting up hospital beds and administering first aid to victims.
“A lot of the medical staff were in shock, but so disciplined, and very effective in the way they helped the victims,” he said.
Meanwhile Mason Wells, who was injured near the airport, suffered his second brush with death after also escaping the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013.
The 19-year-old from Utah reportedly was traveling with fellow Mormon missionaries Richard Norby, 66, and Joseph Empey, 20.
One of the most widely circulated images of survivors from the airport attack was of 37-year-old professional basketball player Sebastien Bellin, shown bloodied and sprawled on his back.
The former player with Belgian team BC Telenet Oostende is now recovering in the hospital after an operation on his leg.
“The force of the blast was sufficient to throw him 6 feet up into the air, and he landed back and he got shrapnel in his left leg and his right hip,” Bellin’s father, Jean, told CNN.
“He is obviously stunned. The first words out of his mouth were: ‘You wouldn’t believe the carnage I saw around.'”
United in grief
Hours after two explosions ripped through Brussels’ airport and a third in its subway system, hundreds of the city’s residents began to converge on the Place de la Bourse.
They came armed — with candles, Belgian flags and sleeping bags — to keep watch over a glowing shrine through the night.
As daylight rose over the Place de la Bourse, mourners continued their show of solidarity, forming an impromptu human chain around the ever-growing tribute.
Later, the crowd observed a minute of silence, while the nation itself marks three days of mourning for victims of the attack.