It is October 17, 2023, 24 hours after the Lassoued attack in which two Swedes lost their lives. The threat level in Brussels is 4 and there is a chase in Anderlecht overnight. The police are hot on the heels of a hire car with a Polish licence plate, as our colleagues from Het Laatste Nieuws report. A television crew follows the police patrol to understand how a night of action goes when the threat level is so high.
The victim finally surrenders to the police, who ask him why he acted the way he did. He states that he is just a simple family man and does not have a driving licence. Later at the police station, the officers find out that he is in fact a radicalised man and has no children. He is known to the state security service. He is known and convicted of various offences in connection with a terrorist organisation and has come into conflict with the state security service five times. There are around 20 cases on his criminal record.
The man appears before the magistrate and is eventually released on the basis of the information provided. A week later, he threatens to carry out an attack in Mons because his family died in Gaza. He is arrested again, but again there is not enough evidence to lock him up.
Jurgen De Landsheer, Chief of Police of the Brussels-Midi zone, understands that this can lead to frustration: “Our job is to follow the procedures and ensure that the file is complete so that the investigating judge has all the information he needs. In this way, we minimise the risk of something not going as planned”
” It has already happened and it can still happen. That is the biggest challenge for the police: to prepare for the invisible enemy, for the unpredictable. The reality is that sometimes there is a loophole in the system,” continues Jurgen De Landsheer. “In most cases, everything goes well. In this case, I think people have made their decisions consciously. We need to have confidence in the system and invest more in the functioning of our services. We will never be able to avoid the danger, there is no such thing as 100 per cent certainty. What we need to tackle are cases of reoffending, as is the case here. It’s about looking after people properly and treating them humanely so that they can be reintegrated into society. Locking them up in a dungeon is not the solution. www.lesoir.be