It’s hardly conceivable that the tragedy that occurred at the Brussels Airport and metro station in Belgium but a few days ago could have been any worse.

But we’re now learning that, truly, it could’ve been. A. Whole. Lot. Worse.

According to NBC News and other news outlets in both North America and Europe, it’s now apparent that the suicide bombing brothers behind the Brussels massacre — named Khalid and Ibrahim El Bakraoui (who also provided safe haven and weapons to those responsible for the Paris attacks last November — were precociously attempt to obtain radioactive materials to construct a “dirty bomb”. They were, reportedly, stalking and monitoring a high-level Belgian nuclear scientist using a hidden camera, with the hopes that kidnapping him would grant access to the substances necessary to build such a nightmare weapon.

Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence officer currently assigned to monitor such cataclysmic scenarios and plots, gathered and offered the details. He’s the CEO of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center privacy consultancy.

More from NBC News:

This camera produced more than 10 hours of film showing the comings and goings of senior researcher at a Belgian nuclear center and his family — footage that was seized during a Belgian raid in November, officials announced last month.

Belgium’s Federal Agency for Nuclear Control confirmed to NBC News on Thursday that the nuclear expert who was spied on was “one of the top researchers” at the SCKCEN Belgian nuclear research center in Mol, 45 miles northeast of Brussels.

“If terrorists are filming one of the top guys in the research center then it is very serious,” FANC spokesman Lodewijk van Bladel said. “It means they are planning to do something afterwards with that information … I don’t think they going to make a family movie.”

Experts believe the brothers spied on the researcher, who has not been identified for his own safety, and planned to blackmail him to acquire dangerous material.

“We can imagine that the terrorists might want to kidnap someone or kidnap his family,” Nele Scheerlinck, another spokeswoman for FANC, said in February after the footage was first revealed.

The SCKCEN Belgian nuclear research center in Mol, 45 miles northeast of Brussels — where the researcher worked, is one of the world’s leading storer of radioisotopes, which are used generally by hospitals and factories but can also be finagled to make a makeshift nuclear explosive.

In the wake of the attacks and this startling news, extra troops have been deployed to guard Belgium’s Doel and Tihange nuclear plants.

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