2023-09-05 09:37:00
Commissioner Vos co-directed the police investigation into the Brabant Killings for fifteen years. Apart from his colleague Lionel Ruth, no one has worked so long on the file.
We are two years away from the prescription. Should this be amended so as to prevent the file from being definitively closed on November 10, 2025 and the investigation, which has been going on for forty years, from being able to continue. This is the project of the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne.
If Commissioner Eddy Vos speaks in a personal capacity, his answers are likely to make noise.
“Draw a line”
“If the rules on prescription are not changed, it will mean that the perpetrators will have won impunity in two years. On November 10, 2025, they will be able to appear and come and say ‘it was us’: justice will no longer be able to judging them. Of course, that would be scandalous, unbearable. But let’s be serious: who can believe in such a scenario and still hope that there will be belated confessions”.
Brabant killers: have we forgotten an atrocious crime never cleared up?
For Eddy Vos, modifying the rules relating to prescription for the third time would only contribute to continuing to fuel fantasies. “We must stop with the fantasies circulating on this file. There is nothing ‘grand conspiracy’. We are the ones who made it a big conspiracy. Continuing to investigate will only serve to feed the fantasies once more and once more. In my opinion, it is time, following 40 years, to draw a line. Not in any way, of course, but by opening the file to scientific study as parliament did in the years 2000 by creating parliamentary commissions of inquiry into the Lumumba and Julien Lahaut files, which had also been unsuccessful. For my part, I would entrust the file of the killings to specialized historians, on the understanding that their work and their conclusions be returned The case of the Brabant killings has become the symbol of all that is wrong in Belgium in the functioning of justice and the police. This is what feeds the conspiracy theories that circulate. In my opinion, the moment there are times when you have to draw a line under the investigation, throw in the towel and recognize that the perpetrators were smarter than us. Hundreds of investigators and judges who have succeeded for forty years have failed to unmask them. It’s a shame to say it, but that’s the way it is.”
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The case of the Brabant killings has become the symbol of all that is wrong in Belgium in the functioning of justice and the police.
500 months of investigation
“After 40 years and all the means we have put in to succeed, we have not found enough elements to do justice before an assize court”, continues Eddy Vos who was the first to say, there a few years ago, that we “had no right to let go”. “When it happened that we found something – I am thinking of the weapons and other objects found in Ronquières – it led to nothing. You have to become realistic and come back down to earth. Any investigator knows that the first weeks of investigation are the most important. What makes you think that we can still find a decisive element when we arrive at 500 months of investigation.
We found Joost V., convinced of having seen the famous Golf GTI of the Tueurs du Brabant: “I remember it like it was yesterday”
“Already too late”
The former head of investigation, now retired, believes that assuming once morest all odds that we find this decisive element that we have never found in forty years, still it would be necessary that the authors be still alive.
“I remind you that according to the profiling, some authors must have been 50 years old and over in 1982/1985. If we find them today, will we have to take them out of a home and bring them in a Rollator to the box of an assize court?
Eddy Vos invites you to watch the trial of the Brussels attacks.
“It took seven years to prepare the trial of the attacks when we knew the main suspects right away. In the file of the killings which comprises several hundred thousand pages, it is unrealistic, unless the rules of the prescription, to imagine the possibility of organizing a trial when there are only two years left. I am not alone in thinking that we must draw a line, including on the side of some of the civil parties.
“The Judge investigating the Brabant Killers must know this”: the strange covert affair of the microphones stashed in the Prime Minister’s office
“Our mistake, the preconceived ideas”
And then, wonders the former head of investigation, continue for what purpose? “To still classify the file and archive it in the cellars of a courthouse infested with rats? There are better things to do. Public opinion must know that the hundreds of investigators who participated in the research n “didn’t sit idly by for forty years nor were they part of a grand conspiracy where they covered each other up so as not to find the truth. Scientists who study the record will see that we don’t have I didn’t spend the time filling hundreds of thousands of pages by copying telephone directories. We all worked for the same purpose: to find. We HAVE to admit that the authors were the smartest. They were able to use the flaws of the system and put the investigators on the wrong tracks. They knew how to take advantage of the changes of magistrates and investigators. There were changes due to promotion, illness, retirement. They were inevitable but each time , it sometimes took longer to dismantle the work that had been done by the previous team instead of using this work to continue moving forward. Another error, which may not have gone away, was to be guided by preconceived ideas. To say to oneself: it must be like that, therefore, it is like that”.
Brabant killings: “The Beijer track? Absolutely absurd!”, Judge Luc Hennart
Seasoned magistrates
In this vein, Eddy Vos recalls that “today two experienced magistrates are at the head of the investigation. But the day will come when they too will have to leave the case. Who will take their place? Young magistrates who were born well following the fact? Who will still be able to read, and above all understand, this file which comprises hundreds of thousands of pages? The same goes for the investigators. “
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