This post was originally published on Hespress
You will shortly be re-directed to the publisher's website
A spree of drug-linked shootings, one deadly, has set Brussels on edge with authorities appearing powerless to stem a rise in violent crime linked to a booming narcotics trade.
Footage went viral of masked men firing automatic weapons outside a Brussels metro station on Wednesday as commuters scattered for safety. This has heightened a growing sense that drug gangs are operating with impunity.
No arrests have been made over the shooting in the working-class Anderlecht district, which triggered a manhunt after the suspects fled into the metro tunnels.
In two other shootings in Anderlecht since, one man was killed overnight on Thursday to Friday while two people were wounded on Tuesday in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, north of the city centre.
Brussels prosecutor Julien Moinil called the violence “totally unacceptable”, and urged politicians to allocate more resources to policing.
“These shootouts are linked to the presence of criminal groups in Brussels with ties to drug trafficking, which are waging a violent war,” he added.
There were 92 shooting incidents in Brussels last year, killing nine people and wounding 48, according to police data. Six shootings have been recorded since January 1 with Friday’s fatality the first of the year.
All three Anderlecht incidents this week took place in areas known as drug-dealing hotspots. District mayor Fabrice Cumps said the shootings were probably linked.
“We are dealing with gang war and a fight over turf,” he said.
Perched on Europe’s northwest coast, Belgium has become a key hub for criminal gangs smuggling narcotics into the continent.
There have been street shootouts in Antwerp, whose port has become a transit point for cocaine coming from Latin America. The violence has spread to the Belgian capital.
Moinil has pleaded for more police resources to tackle the spike in crime since Wednesday’s metro gunfire, which hit nearby buildings.
“A family woke up to find a bullet hole in their child’s bedroom. How many people need to die before we wake up and tackle the seriousness of this situation?” he asked on RTBF radio.
Moinil hit out at judicial “weaknesses” — meaning that even when arrests are made they often do not result in prosecutions.
He also pointed to chronic overcrowding in Belgium’s prisons: many prison sentences are not served in full, with inmates spending half their time outside.
– ‘Too soft’ –
“You’re out for a month, back inside for a month — then back out,” charged Moinil. “It makes no sense. It’s an obvious hurdle to reintegrating people into society.”
“There’s no question that Brussels is too soft” on crime, he said, adding that there was “a climate of impunity, and that undermines the rule of law”.
Anderlecht mayor Cumps echoed his appeal — zeroing in on the need to make sure convicted drug dealers cannot keep running their operations from jail.
Cumps likewise called for additional resources to help federal police tackle the violence linked to control of trafficking spots — a single one of which generates some 50,000 euros ($51,750) per day, he said.
Tackling drug crime in Brussels is complicated by the city’s complex government — with local policing split between six separate zones, and the state operating the federal police force.
At the national level, a new coalition government that took office this week has promised a tougher line on law and order. But money is tight and it has made no promises of extra police manpower.
Interior Minister Bernard Quintin on Friday said that more officers would be put on patrol — particularly in the Brussels districts of Anderlecht, Saint-Gilles and Forest — as well as in Brussels’s metro stations.
“The streets belong to the people who live there — not to traffickers,” he said.
The conservative-led coalition has called for Brussels’s six police zones to be merged into one for greater efficiency — but the idea has been rejected by district mayors.
They argue that a system already exists that allows them to pool resources in an emergency such as the present spike in drug crime.
The post Deadly drug 'gang war' sets Brussels on edge appeared first on HESPRESS English – Morocco News.