Investigators quickly traced the vehicle. Police sources identified the van's chassis registration: it had been purchased from a second-hand car dealer in Brussels. The transit license plate was the type issued to foreigners staying temporarily in Belgium. A young dark-haired man had registered it under the name Nicola Brazzi, giving a Brussels hotel as his address. The hotel had no record of him. The same name appeared on another hotel register, this time with a nationality listed as Cypriot. The investigation concluded that Brazzi, believed to be Lebanese, had never actually stayed at either location. Within a week, Belgian police in Ghent arrested three German neo-Nazis in connection with the attack, though the full picture would take decades to emerge.

The Antwerp bombing was not an isolated act. Exactly one year earlier, on the eve of Simchat Torah 1980, a bomb had exploded at a Paris synagogue, killing four. The timing was deliberate, the holy day targeted with cruel precision. Belgian Prime Minister Mark Eyskens condemned the Antwerp attack as 'diabolically wicked.' But this was also the second attack on Antwerp's Jewish community in just over a year. In July 1980, a Palestinian had thrown a hand grenade at a group of Jewish schoolchildren departing for vacation, killing one child and wounding twenty others. The attacker was arrested and convicted, but the fear lingered. The diamond district, heart of both Antwerp's Jewish community and its centuries-old gem trade, had become a target.

The investigation stretched across decades and continents. In November 2008, 27 years after the bombing, Canadian authorities in Ottawa arrested a 55-year-old man of Palestinian origin holding Lebanese and Canadian passports. The provisional extradition warrant was issued for the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing, but investigators also named him as a suspect in the Antwerp attack. The case illustrated how terrorism investigations of that era often remained unresolved for decades, suspects scattered across borders, evidence fragmented, international cooperation limited. For the families of the three who died and the 106 wounded, the long wait for accountability stretched into a new century.

Antwerp's diamond district remains one of the world's most concentrated centers of the gem trade, with an estimated 84 percent of the world's rough diamonds passing through its exchanges. The Jewish community that built this industry over centuries continues to maintain its presence despite the violence visited upon it. Security is now pervasive, a visible legacy of the bombings and attacks that scarred the neighborhood. The Portuguese synagogue still stands, its doors and windows long since repaired, its congregation still gathering for services. The intersection of faith, commerce, and history that defines this small neighborhood continues, shaped but not destroyed by the violence of October 1981.