Swedish journalist Teresa Küchler had just grabbed her boarding pass on her way to Sweden at Zaventem airport when she heard what immediately sounded like an explosion.
She was only 100 metres away from where the bombs went off.
“I immediately froze,” Ms Küchler told SBS News.
“I don’t think anybody in that terminal thought anything but ‘this is an attack’.”
Ms Küchler explained the fright quickly descended into chaos.
“I didn’t have time to think really a lot, because only five, six, seven seconds later – if even that long – the bigger explosion went off,” she said.
“This one I could feel through my whole body.”
With only a split-second to decide what to do, Ms Küchler chose to hide.
Swedish journalist Teresa Küchler was in the airport terminal when two explosions occurred. Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
“I decided that I didn’t dare to run outside because I thought maybe the terrorists would be outside and I would be face-to-face with them,” Ms Küchler said.
“So in that split second, you know that tiny little moment you have to decide what to do, I decided to hide inside the terminals so that I wouldn’t meet the terrorists. So I hid behind a counter in a cafeteria.”
Ms Kuchler said she was only behind the counter for five or six minutes, but it “felt like hours”.
“There was just one woman hiding there already and she was just silently crying sitting next to me, and that was really, really chilling because she wasn’t even in panic,” she said.
“She was kind of almost already in grief of, you know, things were gonna end. It was a total resignation or something, and that really freaked me out more than if she had been you know crying or screaming loudly.”
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The sight of a man tacitly surrendering to the terrorists he thought were outside was also difficult for Ms Küchler to watch.
“There was a man very close to me lying on the floor with his hands behind his neck, as a typical ‘I surrender’ kind of [motion],” she said.
“I think it is the image which is going to stay with me for the longest because he must have been thinking, just like me behind the counter, that the terrorists might be outside and they might be coming in. They might finish off what they started with machine guns like they did in Paris.
“I really cannot express how I felt for that man.”
An airport staff member told her to run towards the departure terminals, where she was evacuated with hundreds of others and taken hangar for several hours waiting the all clear.
“I could hear the crying. I could hear first the panic, screams, and then I could hear the sobbing, the lament,” Ms Küchler said.
An hour after the dual blasts at Zaventem airport another explosion struck Maelbeek metro station, near the European Union headquarters.
Australian Joshua Davis works for European Union agency Aliénor EU Consulting, and was on a bus on the way to the train station when he heard a loud bang.
Australian Joshua Davis ran away from Maelbeek train station when he heard the explosion Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
“Well, at first I thought it was a car accident because there was glass broken on the front doors and people screaming, but then I realised that it wasn’t a car, because there was no chance of being that because there was no car to do, so I concluded that it must have been an explosion of some sort,” Mr Davis told SBS News.
“That’s when I realised I’d better get out of here so I just ran away. I just got off the bus and stopped and ran.”
Mr Davis ran to work, before he was later sent home, where he said he’ll stay while the city remains in lockdown.
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