Brabant killers
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Nijvel gang or the Brabant killers ("De Bende van Nijvel" or "de Bende" in Dutch, "Les Tueurs du Brabant"or "les Tueurs fous du Brabant wallon" or "les Tueurs fous du Brabant" in French) is a group or groups thought to be responsible for the "Brabant massacres", a series of violent attacks that occurred mostly in the province of Brabant in Belgium between 1982 and 1985, in which 28 people died and over 20 others were injured, money taken was sometimes found dumped.
The gang was named for the city of Nivelles ("Nijvel in Dutch), in Walloon Brabant province, where the gang's robbery of an arms dealer resulted in the death of two civilians and a police officer.
The gang carried out armed robberies of restaurants, stores, supermarkets and one weapons depot. What set the gang apart was their readiness to commit murder for no reason and their apparent lack of a normal criminal orientation towards stealing the maximum amount of money for the minimum risk. This led to suspicions that it represented an effort to destabilize the country coming from disgruntled members of the Belgian Gendarmerie ("Rijkswacht" in Dutch, "Gendarmerie" in French), a paramilitary police force then supervised by the Belgian Minister of Defense. Some of the weapons used to carry out the murders had been stolen from a Belgian Gendarmerie arsenal in 1979.
According to the survivors' eyewitness testimony, the gang was composed of three recurring gangleaders, assisted by a larger group of changing people. The three gangleaders were commonly called the Giant (because of his height), the Killer (who killed 23 out of the total 28 victims) and the Old Man (because of his age). However some of the earlier crimes are mainly linked by the weapons used or stolen which leaves open a possibility of the guns having been previously rented or sold and hence stolen and used by otherwise unconnected criminal gangs or individuals before passing into the hands of the actual Nijvel gang.
The identity and the whereabouts of the killers remain unknown.
Trivia
Cryns, Pavel, Alewaeters, Stéphane Devriendt, Jacques De Windt were convicted.
See also
- Chris Bonkoffsky
- Communist Combatant Cells
- Operation Gladio
- Police state
- State terrorism
- Years of Lead
- False flag
