Brahim el-Bakraoui was arrested in Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border
Belgium has admitted it made "errors" related to one of the Brussels attackers.
Turkey said on Wednesday it arrested and deported Brahim el-Bakraoui last June, warning Belgium he was a "foreign fighter" but were "ignored".
The Belgian interior and justice ministers offered to resign but say the prime minister refused to let them.
Tuesday's suicide attacks, claimed by so-called Islamic State (IS), killed 31 people and wounded some 300.
On Thursday, Belgium lowered its alert to the second-highest level.
'War situation'
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that one of the Brussels attackers had been caught near Turkey's border with Syria in June 2015, and was deported, at his request, to the Netherlands.
Mr Erdogan said Turkey alerted both the Belgian and Dutch authorities, but "despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter, the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism".
Turkish officials later confirmed he had been talking about Brahim el-Bakraoui.
Dutch Justice Minister Ard Van der Steur on Thursday confirmed Bakraoui had arrived from Turkey on 14 July 2015, but said he had a valid Belgian passport, was not on any wanted lists and so the Dutch authorities had no reason to detain him.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said he had been made aware of the deportation but told public broadcaster VRT: "At that time, he was not known here for terrorism. He was a common law criminal out on parole."
Interior Minister Jan Jambon said he understood why there were questions to be answered over why "we missed the chance to seize him when he was in Turkey".
"In the circumstances it was right to take political responsibility and I offered my resignation to the prime minister," Mr Jambon said.
But he added: "The prime minister and the inner cabinet requested clearly this morning that I stay on, given the current situation, that in a war situation you cannot leave the field."
Brahim el-Bakraoui is one of three men - pictured in the middle on a CCTV image of them - who carried out the bombings at Zaventem airport that killed 11 people.
Unconfirmed reports say another of the airport attackers was the wanted jihadist Najim Laachraoui, whose DNA was found on explosives linked to last year's attacks in Paris. The third suspected airport attacker has not been identified yet and is on the run.
Bakraoui's brother Khalid struck at Maelbeek metro station, where 20 people died.
There are reports of a second suspect being sought for that attack. One source told AFP news agency that a man with a large bag had been seen beside Khalid el-Bakraoui on surveillance footage at the metro station.
Meanwhile, VRT reports that investigators are working on the assumption that the cell had been planning a far bigger attack, involving Paris-style shootings as well as suicide bombings
Link are emerging with Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks in which 130 people died.
Abdeslam was arrested and wounded in a police raid on a flat in the Forest area of Brussels last Friday - four days before the attacks.
On Thursday his lawyer said he had changed his mind and would not fight extradition from Belgium to France.
Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French national born in Belgium, did not have prior knowledge of the Brussels bombings and had stopped co-operating with police following the attacks, his lawyer Sven Mary said.
A court hearing on Thursday on the detention of Abdeslam and two other suspects has been postponed until 7 April.
The director of the EU's police agency, Europol, has told the BBC the network of jihadists in Europe is "more extensive than perhaps we first feared".
Robin Wainwright said there were concerns over "a community of 5,000 suspects that have been radicalised in Europe, that have travelled to Syria and Iraq for conflict experience, some of whom - not all - have since come back to Europe".
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