In 1982, an arms salesman in Dinant is robbed of a hunting rifle by three men. These three men would turn out to be the perpretrators of the most violent crimes ever in Belgium up until the Brussels bombings in 2016.
In three years, these men would commit further robbiers, carjackings, murders, right up until their most deadly hit and runs on Delhaize supermarkets in and around Nivelles, in Walloon Brabant. The gang consisted of a core group of three people: De Reus (the giant), The Killer and De Oudere Man (the older man). The case was never solved, and it is only because of popular pressure that the statute of limitations was lengthened by ten years, otherwise the case would have vanished in the footnotes of history.
What's the motive for these crimes?
The most plausible motives for the murders is the so called 'Tension Strategy', a strategy doctored up by the Clandestine Service of the early post-war CIA. It means that the CIA would aid NATO nations in pushing through more severe intelligence measures combined with a militarized police by funding or starting up left-wing and right-wing militias to combat eachother. This happened most clearly in Italy against the PCI, in Portugal against the Carnation Revolution, and in West Germany against the DDR. Most researches on the Bende have posited that the murders are a branch of the Propaganda Due plot: the lodge P7, created in 1972 to divert attention from P2, has several Belgian anticommunists in its midst. In any case, the mid-'80s were a period in which fascist circles in Belgium had good connections with the gendarmerie, the military police of Belgium. Some researches therefore say it's a purely national form of right-wing terrorism.
Other motives, like exortion or banditism, were researched but aren't serious in any way.
The investigation
Already at the start the investigation was done incredibly shoddily, the main investigator in Nivelles turned his attention to two criminals from the Borinage, even after evidence proved that the men he accused could not have been at the scenes of the crimes at the time.
After the most bloody murders in 1985, the police created a group specifically to investigate the Bende in Dendermonde with the best investigators of both the judicial and the military police. They found that the guns used in the last crimes of the Bende were American, and found the car the Bende used to flee the Delhaize in Aalst, near a villa owned by three Dutchmen. Both leads are never investigated further. The group is disbanded after the police has taken away the case from the Nivelles inspectors and given it to the police of Charleroi, and after the group in Dendermonde asks Brussels police for info on other relevant cases concerning the political elite in Brussels, in particular several confidants of the christian and social democrats.
In 2001 even the police of Charleroi had no other options but to use the most pseudoscientific methods (the lie detector, hypnosis) to try and get another lead on the case. Whatever leads could have been gotten from the links between the right-wing, the gendarmerie and the Brussels elites was almost all gone (it was only after a documentary and two parlimentary commissions that this lead was brought back up, in 1998). The current case file is more than 4 million pages long, and amateur researches have since tried to link with almost any political scandal in Belgium between 1944 abd 2001:
- The disappearance of the list the Belgian government made of all economic collaborators with Nazi Germany (said to be in the hands of 'Black Baron' de Bonvoisin, part of the right-wing within the PSC and alledged sponsor of fascist groups in Belgium
- The murder of communist MP Julien Lahaut (since solved, but perpetrator came from a different part of anticommunist Belgium than the Bende case)
- The rise of CEPIC, the anti-labor faction within the PSC
- The suicide(/murder?) of Paul Latinus, founder of the fascist Westland New Post
- The rise of the VMO and the Front De La Jeunesse, fascist groups with ties to mainstream political parties
- The rise of the CCC, a maoist-inspired group propped up by the Belgian secret services (and possibly part of Gladio in Belgium)
- The murders of Baron Cams and the industrialist Vlassenroot
- The drug trafficing in the Benelux
- The scandals surrounding Paul Vanden Boeynants, head of CEPIC and former PM
- The murder on social democratic chairman André Cools
- The scandal surrounding the order of Agusta helicopters
- The Dutroux Case
- The Belgian support for Mobutu
A potential breakthrough?
Just this week the Charleroi police group still working on the case says it has a 'believable lead' that De Reus was C.B., a former member of the Special Interventions Unit of the gendarmerie at the time. His photo was recognized in 1999 by one of the survivors of the murders in Aalst, but this lead was... never investigated further
lo posted:belgium seems to have unusually high instances of this stuff, do you think that's because NATO is based there or is there some other reason?
i think it's more to do with a failed denazification after the war. the economic collaborators were never abled to be tried, so the only denazification you had were vigilante lynchings of the small fries, not even the justice system cared until the very end. so you have mainstream parties like the psc tolerating fascism in the name of anticommunism. add to that that belgium was already the hotbed for spies during the cold war, which makes it necessary for capital to have belgium be a close partner in the intelligence circle
Edit: what i had in mind i guess was something like this piece on the link between the german state and neonazi groups
Edited by c_man ()
c_man posted:Do you have any definitive documents about the relationship between the CCC and the belgian state services? How much of that relationship is public record?
There was at least one informant for the belgian secret services in CCC: http://bendevannijvel.com/2006/02/18/er-zat-een-mol-in-de-ccc/ that blogpost shows you an article published in 2006 by the mainstream press
http://www.flanderstoday.eu/current-affairs/suspect-arrested-30-year-old-brabant-killers-case
belgend posted:c_man posted:Do you have any definitive documents about the relationship between the CCC and the belgian state services? How much of that relationship is public record?
There was at least one informant for the belgian secret services in CCC: http://bendevannijvel.com/2006/02/18/er-zat-een-mol-in-de-ccc/ that blogpost shows you an article published in 2006 by the mainstream press
thanks! as i mentioned in the edit to my post, id also be interested in anything else you had as well
ilmdge posted:Did this arrest end up being nothing?
http://www.flanderstoday.eu/current-affairs/suspect-arrested-30-year-old-brabant-killers-case
as far as i know nothing came off of this, who knows a renewed investigation might.
the worker's party of belgium is going to do a whole report on the case. they were one of the first to propose the tension strategy motive for the killers