An investigative judge from Antwerp has been living in a safe house for several weeks after receiving threats from drugs mafia members.
A 27-year-old convicted drugs criminal, who is currently in a Belgian jail, allegedly relayed threats against the judge via mobile phone from his cell after having previously sworn revenge against him after he was sentenced by the magistrate to more time in jail.
Belgian media reported on November 28 that the police have already made half a dozen house searches and combed the 27-year-old’s cell.
Only a limited amount of information about the case was disclosed by the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office due, it said, to potential security risks.
“As long as the special security measures concerning the investigating judge remain in place, we will not comment on the substance of the case,” Kristof Aerts, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, told local newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen.
The drugs criminal accused of threatening the judge was sentenced to a further six years in prison by him in October 2023 for orchestrating an attack on a house near Antwerp while already in jail.
The house belonged to the parents of another known drug criminal. During the attack, two Molotov cocktails were thrown at the building. The incident was reportedly an act of retaliation for a previous attack on the 27-year-old’s own parents’ home in the same city.
He was subsequently transferred to a different cell. He had originally been in Saint-Gilles prison after his conviction but he had repeatedly managed to get hold of mobile phones to continue his criminal activities.
Despite being moved, he was able to have another mobile phone smuggled into his new cell in Hasselt as well. As a result, one prison guard was arrested and interrogated for alleged involvement in the criminal getting the phone.
Now, the 27-year-old is in a prison in Bruges under a special security regime so that he cannot have any contact with the outside world.
Of the judge in hiding, the president of the court wrote to staff recently saying: “We all sympathise with the colleague in question, who is fortunately doing well and being well looked after.
“We can assure you that at the moment there is no reason to fear that our court or staff will be targeted. There is no heightened security risk.”
The Association of Examining Magistrates struck a different tone. “We feel unsafe at our job”, president of the association Philippe Van Linthout told news outlet VRT NWS on November 28.
“The increasing crudeness of organised crime is the talking point in the corridors,” he said.
“Colleagues feel unsafe in their own offices. They see their names popping up in drug files because in the mobiles of criminals, we find the number plates of investigating judges and other private data.”
Van Linthout claimed that the buildings they worked in were “a disaster”.
“They are old and not well secured. Moreover, the prisons are overcrowded so we cannot lock up people who belong there. They are also riddled with security flaws, evident from the widespread circulation of mobile phones. From their cells, inmates can remain criminally active and thus threaten us, too.
“When suspects appear before us, they say things like, ‘That tie, you wear that one often, don’t you?’ Or they refer to hobbies. All of it is meant to show how much they know,” Van Linthout said.
It is suspected that the increasing sense of insecurity has come about as a consequence of successful investigations into organised crime.
Belgian investigators were able to arrest numerous top figures in the international drug trade as a result of cracking the encrypted messaging system often used by the underworld, called Sky ECC, in March 2021, after which the network shut down.
