Linda A. Thompson

Special for USA TODAY

BRUSSELS — A 19th-century law has become the latest flashpoint in the finger-pointing over who failed to prevent last week's terror attacks at Brussels Airport and a metro station.

Two suspects, brothers Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui — killed in the airport suicide bombings — had been conditionally released from prison for a previous crime because of the 1888 law.

Ibrahim El Bakraoui was sentenced to 10 years for shooting at a police officer in 2010. He served four years and nine months before being let go. And Khalid El Bakraoui served three years of a five-year sentence for a 2011 armed robbery before he was set free in 2013.

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Both men violated the terms of their conditional release — Khalid was in contact with former criminal associates, while Ibrahim failed to show for appointments with his justice assistant — but police were unable to locate and re-arrest them.

The brothers would still be serving their sentences were it not for the law Lejeune, named for Belgian justice minister Jules Le Jeune, who introduced it in 1888. The law allows inmates to be released from prison after they served a third of their sentence.

“That’s just wrong,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon told the Belgian daily De Morgen on Monday about the early release of Ibrahim El Bakraoui. “Especially if you look at the mild conditions he was given.”

Jambon, a member of the right-wing N-VA party, said the governing parties had already agreed to update the law in their 2014 coalition agreement.

“Everyone wants to make the law stricter, but the question is: How far should we go? N-VA wants to go pretty far. We feel at least four-fifths of a sentence should be served,” he told the newspaper.

It’s not the first time the law has come under scrutiny.

There was a fierce public outcry when Belgium's most notorious pedophile, Marc Dutroux, was granted conditional release in 1992.

After that, stricter provisions were introduced for conditional release and removed the decision-making process from justice ministers to give it to sentence enforcement courts.

Kris Luyckx, a lawyer at the Desdalex law firm in the Flemish city of Antwerp, wasn’t surprised by renewed calls to overhaul the law.

“When a society is so deeply struck at its core, you can always expect a sort of revenge feeling toward the people who committed those facts.”

The public wants those found guilty of such attacks to be “sentenced as harshly and as long as possible, preferably with just water and bread and no TV or radio,” the lawyer said.

For Luyckx, the days of an eye for an eye are over.

“This is a very humanist law that is built on the idea that everyone, at one point, will re-enter society,” he said. “And the law works.”

Justice minister Koen Geens said Tuesday that he doesn’t want to overhaul the law.

“Now is not the time for a deep discussion on this topic,” he told the Belgian news agency Belga.