2023-06-26 08:50:00
It is a kept secret place which is a few tens of meters under the Brussels courthouse. The evidence warehouse stores some 570,000 items of all kinds: unusual objects, but also narcotics and weapons. This is where all potential evidence related to criminal cases is collected. Exceptionally, an RTL info team was able to enter this extraordinary place.
To get there, you have to go down dozens of steps and pass through several secure doors. It is the least visited place in the courthouse. Out of sight, a gigantic warehouse of 12,000 square meters.
“Here are stored some of the evidence useful for all legal proceedings”says Anne Leloux, clerk in charge of exhibits.
In the warehouse, are kept evidence related from far or near to criminal cases: theft, extortion, or murders.
Some pieces are out of the “ordinary”. “The priest’s hand is the most unusual part of the registry. It has been preserved for almost 20 years. Why is this an exhibit? Because the priest before he died wrote down a phone number”explains the clerk.
1,500 weapons are destroyed every year
Last year, 4,500 pieces left the courthouse: firearms, but also cocaine and cannabis. These exhibits have been destroyed or sold because they no longer have any legal use.
“18 m3 of narcotics were destroyed in 2022. There are also weapons. We have more or less 8,000 weapons within the palace. 1,500 are destroyed per year, following a decision taken by the magistrate”adds the clerk.
Today, the courthouse warehouse is saturated and dilapidated. The exhibits are now stored in another location, kept secret. 300 new plays are registered here every day, and the number has only increased in recent years.
“The idea is actually to speed up the management of these items, particularly at the narcotics level where the vast majority of seized narcotics are immediately destroyed, except for a sample to check the quality of the narcotic in question. For the rest, we must speed up things, while keeping in mind that it must be used in the context of a trial and that you must not therefore be too fast, at the risk of having procedural problems”underlines Denis Goeman, press magistrate of the Brussels Court of First Instance.
570,000 pieces of evidence are still kept in these warehouses: evidence intended to solve certain criminal cases.
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