Megabucks cocaine trafficking has fueled a surge in gang violence in Brussels, according to the senior official in charge of combating Belgium’s drugs problem.
In the past three days, four shootings have rocked the capital, culminating in a deadly attack in Anderlecht in the early hours on Friday. While investigations are still ongoing, authorities are attributing the escalating bloodshed to turf wars between rival drug gangs with big guns.
“This is not just some street criminality. This is gang stuff,” Belgium’s Drug Commissioner Ine Van Wymersch told POLITICO Friday morning.
According to Van Wymersch, gang violence in Belgium has become much more prominent on the streets since the Covid-19 pandemic, which she attributed to drug dealers changing up their primary product lines.
“With the introduction of cocaine, there is a lot more money involved. And with this money, they can engage more people to work for them, but they can also buy heavy weapons like they did here,” she explained, adding that it’s the extra cash incentives making the territory more dangerous.
“Because at one hotspot — one selling point, so to say — they earn like €50,000 a day. So that’s worth fighting over,” she added.
‘Dirty jobs’
Van Wymersch was appointed as Belgium’s first drug commissioner in February 2023. Her role was created following a drug-related shooting in Antwerp in January 2023 in which an 11-year-old girl was killed.
“Our mission is to level up the fight against organized crime by getting a clear image of what goes beyond police data,” she said. For security reasons, she added, the location of her office is kept secret.
Fighting the drug war in 2025 has additional challenges, from identifying gangs to trying to bust secure communications. Van Wymersch explained that globalization has made it much harder to assess the identity and background of criminals.
“It’s not like you can follow the Italian chain, or the Serbian or the Moroccan chain,” she said.“They are all working for each other and in a much more anonymous way.”
“Today they all have nicknames, they use encrypted communication. They don’t know a lot about the organization where they are involved in. They know their counterpart, but they don’t have to see each other anymore,” she said. “It’s very diverse. That’s what we see in the street, that a lot of vulnerable people are recruited to do the dirty jobs.”
The recent wave of violence in Brussels began early Wednesday, when two masked men shot Kalashnikov-style weapons outside the Clemenceau metro station in Anderlecht. On Thursday morning, two other shootings occurred — the first one in the Saint-Josse region near the European Quarter and the second at Clemenceau again — leaving three people injured in total.
Following the incidents, Brussels Mayor Philippe Close convened an urgent meeting Thursday afternoon with the mayors of the city’s different municipalities to discuss the security concerns and coordinate with the Brussels’ Public Prosecutor’s Office.
During the meeting, all mayors decided to temporarily bring all the city’s separate police forces under one umbrella to try to get the violence under control.
Invest seized assets into policing
Brussels has urgent problems it needs to be sorting out at a logistical and societal level, Van Wymersch said
“Really, the need for rebuilding society in Brussels is clear. And if we see what the citizens are asking for, it is really to clean up the streets, get the lighting back, make sure that people are living in good conditions, that we have access to jobs and that our kids are going to school again. This is about quality of life,” she said.
She argued that although Brussels is a logistical hub and has many of the problems common to big cities, the fact that it is administrated by 19 different mayors is a particularly big problem. “Nineteen authorities, 19 mayors, makes it complicated to have coordination,” she said.
Van Wymersch said she is now working on pushing the new Belgian government, which was appointed on Jan. 31 after seven months of negotiations, to implement a new asset recovery model to reinvest the money seized from criminal organizations into law enforcement.
“At the moment we don’t have a specific asset recovery system here in Belgium,” she said, adding that the money and assets seized from criminal groups is now going to the federal budget.
“We think that the money that we take, the luxury cars, everything that we are taking from the criminal world, should be reinvested in law enforcement and in rebuilding society,” she said.
The post Cocaine cash propels Brussels gang wars to dangerous heights, drugs czar says appeared first on Politico.
