– Blood in the elevator –
“We heard the explosion and felt the blowback,” Jean-Pierre Lebeau, a French passenger who had just arrived from Geneva, told AFP, adding that he had seen wounded people and “blood in the elevator”.
“First we were kept together by the border police, then they gave us the order to evacuate,” Lebeau said.
The ceilings collapsed, he said, describing a smell of gunpowder at the scene.
With shock on their faces, Jean-Pierre Herman embraced his wife Tankrat Paui Tran, who he had just gone to collect from the airport after her flight from Thailand.
“My wife just arrived,” Herman said. “I said hello, we took the elevator and in the elevator we heard the first bomb.
“The second exploded just when we got off. We ran away to an emergency exit. I think we are very lucky.”
An AFP correspondent on their way to the airport said roads to the terminal had been blocked and trains halted.
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson, a British journalist living in Brussels, told AFP there had been “total confusion” at the airport, where she was having breakfast.
“Suddenly staff rushed in and said we have to leave,” she said.
“They rushed out and into the main terminal A departures building. Nobody knew what was going on.
“It was total confusion, people were just standing around wondering what was happening.”
There was no immediate confirmation of the cause of the blasts.
Europe’s main stock markets retreated as the news broke, with London’s benchmark FTSE 100 index dropping 0.6 percent compared with Monday’s close and Frankfurt’s DAX 30 shedding 1.1 percent.
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