AKIPRESS.COM - The Belgian health minister, Maggie De Block, has just spoken to Belgian broadcaster VTM and said there were 250 injured and 34 dead.

People were killed at Brussels airport and at Maelbeek metro station as a number of explosions hit these crowded places on March 22.

There have been several conflicting reports on the numbers of dead and injured from both attacks.

The first victim of the Brussels attacks has been identified as Adelma Marina Tapia Ruiz by the foreign ministry, the Guardian reported, citing Agence France-Presse. The 37-year-old woman from Peru was killed during the bombings at the Brussels Airport in Zaventem, while one of her twin daughters was injured by flying debris. Ruiz had been living in Brussels for six years and was at the airport with her husband, Christophe Delcambe, and twin daughters, her brother, Fernando Tapia, told a Peruvian radio station, according to the Guardian. Ruiz was reportedly catching a flight to New York when the attacks happened.

Belgium’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, has told RTL TV that authorities knew that some kind of extremist act was being prepared in Europe but that they were surprised by the scale of the attacks in Brussels.

Jambon said on Tuesday that “it was always possible that more attacks could happen but we never could have imagined something of this scale”. Jambon said that “we had no information about this, but we know that things were moving in Europe, in different countries, in France, in Germany, here”.

He said the Belgian authorities have no information about the planning of “any kind of action in Brussels at this time”.

Two of the suspected attackers were captured on CCTV dressed in black and wearing black gloves on their left hands thought to have concealed detonators. Federal prosecutor Frederic van Leeuw said the two men “very likely committed a suicide attack”.

Belgian police launched a series of raids in a massive manhunt for a third man, who is thought to have escaped following the attacks without detonating his own suitcase bomb.

The identities of the men are not known and police issued photographs asking the public to help name them.