Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborn announced his resignation from the government on Friday night, four days after an attack in Brussels by a radicalized illegal Tunisian killed two Swedes, AFP reports.

During a press conference, the minister explained that he learned on Friday that Tunisia had requested the extradition of the author of the August 2022 attack, Abdesalem Lassoued, a request that had not been processed by Brussels prosecutors.

“The competent judge did not grant this extradition request and the file was not processed,” Van Quickenborn noted.

“This is an individual, monumental mistake, an unacceptable mistake with dramatic consequences,” he added, adding that he “will take responsibility for this by resigning.”

“I make no excuses. I consider it my duty. This new information from the prosecutor’s office touches me to the core, because I have done everything possible to improve our justice,” he added.

Monday night’s attack, which took place near the center of Brussels shortly before a soccer match between Belgium and Sweden, targeted Swedish fans.

The gunman, a radical whose asylum application had been rejected and who had been ordered to leave Belgium but was never carried out, killed two of them in cold blood with an AR-15. He wounded the third before fleeing on a scooter.

A 45-year-old Tunisian man was found on Tuesday morning in a cafe in the Brussels commune of Charbec, where he was fatally wounded by police fire. His gun was found.

Abdesalem Lasoued was known to Belgian authorities for several crimes, including threatening to kill an asylum seeker, according to judicial authorities. But he was not listed in the database of Ocam, the federal agency responsible for analyzing terrorist threats.

After the attack, Vincent Van Quickenborn simply indicated that Belgium had been informed in 2016 by a “foreign police service” of Lassued’s radical profile, without any reference to a terrorist past.

Before applying for asylum in Belgium, where he says he arrived in late 2015, the Tunisian made similar requests in Norway, Sweden and then Italy – requests that were rejected each time.