Quote:
Originally posted by
NotAPretender
eek! Belgium for some reason I would not suspect.
Oh, we've had our share of political assassinations here as well ─ both within our borders and outside of them. A few examples follow...
Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected (and socialist) prime minister of the Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony that had been brutally exploited and reigned with an iron fist by the Belgian king Leopold II as his private property.
Lumumba's election didn't sit well with the pro-colonial elements within the Belgian government and the entourage of the royal family ─ which holds far more power than the royal family itself, and also engages in things the royal family has no real knowledge about. So they placed an order for Lumumba's assassination with the CIA, and the CIA delivered. Lumumba was then replaced by the pro-Belgian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who in turn was ousted in the 1990s coup by the just as ruthless Laurent Désiré Kabila. Mobutu himself was executed by one of Kabila's sons while trying to escape the country. Laurent Kabila himself was later on assassinated by a sniper, and was then succeeded by his son Joseph.
Officially, Patrice Lumumba's killer remains unknown, but his descendants have demanded the reopening of the investigation from the Belgian government a few years ago.
After World War II, the Belgian population was literally torn in two due to the fact that king Leopold III had ─ after the death of his wife ─ begun a relationship with a woman from a Nazi-collaborating family, as well as that he, at a meeting with Adolf Hitler, had uttered the words "Mein Führer, was ist mein Platz in Ihrem Reich?" ("What is my place in your empire?")
Leopold III had basically offered Belgium to Hitler on a platter. So after the war had ended, half of the population wanted him out, while the other half ─ enamored with all things royalty, as the lower-educated classes tend to be ─ wanted him to stay. Eventually Leopold III stepped down and abdicated the throne to his then only 21-year-old son Boudewijn ─ ─ even though English literature prefers using the French spelling "Baudouin", he was raised in Dutch and his legal name was effectively Boudewijn.
Now, Boudewijn himself was an honorable man, and of course, at that point in time, he was also still very young and inexperienced. But at his coronation, Julien Lahaut, the leader of the Communist Party, shouted the words "Vive la république" "("Long live the republic!"). Lahaut was later on assassinated by two men outside of his own home. One of the two men was later identified as François Goossens, a royalist, but it remains unclear whether he was the one who fired the shots. As such, the murder has never been solved.
During the 1980s, there was a violent series of holdups being committed ─ primarily against supermarkets belonging to a certain group, although there were some other targets as well ─ by a group of criminals referred to as the Brabant Killers. Even though the loot from their holdups was always suspiciously small, each of their holdups was marked by an enormous amount of gratuitous bloodshed. In total, they killed 28 people, among whom at least one police officer and at least one child. Several other people were wounded and maimed in the attacks. The criminals were observed operating as trained commandos, they carried sophisticated (for the time) weapons ─ such as a Franchi SPAS-12 semi-automatic shotgun ─ and they had a preference for the Volkswagen Golf GTI, at that point in time one of the fastest "hot hatches" available, which later on (for obviously political reasons) caused the Belgian Gendarmes to acquire vehicles of the exact same type as patrol cars.
The Killers were allegedly led by a tall blond man ─ referred to as "the Giant" ─ later thought to have been Patrick Haemers, a drug-addicted and quite violent criminal who later on kidnapped former prime minister Paul Vandenboeynandts. Haemers and two of his cohorts ─ among whom his wife, Denise Tyack ─ were eventually arrested in Brazil and extradited to Belgium. He committed suicide in his cell under very suspicious circumstances. Apparently he hung himself from the radiator in his cell with the electric cord of his transistor radio. Very few people believed the official story, and apart from his wife and a few officials, nobody ever got to see his body, which spawned rumors of his death having been faked and him having been allowed to escape abroad "because he knew too much". Although not impossible, it also challenges one's imagination how a 1.90+-meter-tall and physically very fit man like Haemers could hang himself from a radiator whose highest point was less than a meter away from the floor with a simple electric cord.
Still, even to this very day, there is serious doubt as to whether Haemers was the tall blond leader of the Brabant killers, and this is especially understandable if you keep in mind that the investigation into the Brabant killers was being obstructed and sidetracked from day one. Every time an investigator got a little too close, he or she was relieved from the case by some entities higher up in the Justice Department, and the file ─ worth several thousands of pages already, even back at the time ─ was handed over to a completely new investigator, who then had to start going over the material from scratch.
Several leads were investigated. Apparently there was a connection with a right-wing extremist group within the Belgian Gendarmes, known as the Westland New Post, and several people ─ some of whom were ex-Gendarmes, while others were just well-known violent criminals ─ were arrested, questioned and eventually released again for lack of any evidence. But by that time, too much damage had already been inflicted upon the integrity of the investigation, and it was a given that they weren't ever going to make any legitimate arrests in the case of the Brabant Killers anymore.
Another lead that was also investigated was whether Gladio was involved. Gladio was a CIA stay-behind sleeper network in Europe, put up during the Cold War for in case the Soviets were to invade Western Europe. Among other things, they have been linked to right-wing terrorist attacks in former Yugoslavia and Italy.
One curious thing about Patrick Haemers and his kidnapping of Paul Vandenboeynandts is that Paul Vandenboeynandts himself was not without controversy either. He was a member of the francophone Christian-Democrat Party, although he was perfectly bilingual and could speak Dutch without any accent at all. And while he was a Christian-democrat, he did entertain a close friendship with the Baron le Bonvoisin of Brussels, a notorious right-wing extremist. Vandenboeynandts was also a millionaire, and his name was constantly popping up in just about every serious organized crime investigation of (at the time) the last twenty years. He was also convicted for fraud once, but he later applied for the "restoration of honor" procedure ─ a procedure that can only be applied for once in a lifetime, and in which a person's entire criminal record is wiped clean again ─ and then he ran for the municipal elections of Brussels, although he lost those elections.
Another point of controversy surrounding Paul Vandenboeynandts was the fact that he was serving as Belgium's prime minister at the time NATO decided to store nuclear weapons in Belgium, at the USAF enclave within the Belgian Air Force base of Kleine Brogel, near Brussels. There was a lot of resistance against this from left-wing and anti-war groups, and the Belgian government has long denied ─ and is still officially denying ─ that there would be any nuclear weapons there, but former Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem once casually revealed that "Everyone knows there are nuclear weapons there." And indeed, a secret like that is hard to hide when every Belgian male was at the time still being conscripted for a temporary active service in the military ─ military conscription was ultimately abolished here, but not before 1995. I was conscripted, I've served in the Army, and I know that there are nuclear bombs ─ not missiles but bombs, to be dropped from a jet ─ at Kleine Brogel.
Either way, Vandenboeynandts has been dead for a while now ─ he was not a young man anymore ─ and was even honored with a state funeral. And as for the Brabant Killers, they have so far never been found. The case was about to be declared cold ─ criminal offenses have a 30-year expiry ─ but has been reopened a few years ago due to new testimonies and new discoveries. Yet up until this point in time, the only lead ─ and for that matter, a heavily contested one ─ is a testimony regarding a former and meanwhile deceased police officer with far-right sympathies, who would allegedly have been one of the Killers. But then again, this police officer ─ whether he truly was involved with the Killers or whether said tip was yet another dead end ─ died of natural causes, and it is a known fact that one of the Killers was effectively mortally wounded by a police bullet during a shootout but carried away from the scene by his comrades before he died. There have been several tips, and the police have dug up entire lots of land looking for the body of the mortally wounded Killer, but no body was ever found.
One of the theories that emerged during the investigation was that the actions of the Brabant Killers were actually only a disguise for a chain of terrorist events that were meant to turn Belgium into a fascist police state, as per the sympathies of the Westland New Post and Baron le Bonvoisin. I doubt we'll ever find out the truth, though.