2023-07-27 18:36:56
A car or garbage cans on fire near the Gare du Midi: these incidents are repeated from week to week, not to mention the numerous attacks in the area. This creates a feeling of insecurity in this district of the station, as much for tourists as for local residents. All around the station, alongside begging, undocumented migrants and the homeless, drug use and dealing are also very present.
“In this neighborhood we encounter different problems: theft, vandalism, violence or drug addiction”confirms Marianne Hiernaux, spokesperson for SNCB. “It’s linked to the fact that it’s an international station, which is located in a big city and no less than 50,000 people pass through it every day”.
Near the station, hotels and restaurants are also seeing an increase in acts of vandalism against them. But more generally, it is the whole atmosphere around the station that disenchants tourists who have come to discover the European capital. “Security problems are reported to hotel managers: pickpocketing, feeling of insecurity, but also about the station itself or its reception and accessibility. All of this means that these hotels have bad comments or bad notes. This damages the reputation of hotels and especially of Brussels. And of Belgium too”according to Rodolphe Van Weyenbergh, general secretary of the Brussels Hotel Association.
Since mid-June, the Summer Plan has been activated with the preventive and more visible presence of the police: 240 police officers are thus in reinforcement just in this perimeter of the Gare du Midi, considered a priority zone in the capital.
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