A young municipal councillor in the Brussels municipality of Ganshoren has been arrested by federal police on August 18 after being found helping to move boxes containing approximately 100kg of cannabis.
Gaël Mukiza, aged 21, was elected to the Ganshoren communal council in 2024 as an independent candidate on the PS+Citoyens list, a ticket headed by the Parti Socialiste (PS), which forms part of the local majority.
He has served as a councillor and briefly chaired a council meeting earlier this year as a substitute. Ganshoren is one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region and has about 25,000 residents.
According to reports confirmed by the Brussels public prosecutor’s office, federal judicial police raided a garage on Avenue des Neuf Provinces at around 7pm on August 18.
The garage sits beneath a social housing block that public broadcaster RTBF has described as a drug hotspot targeted by the federal judicial police.
Mukiza was present with a neighbour and a third person, stacking boxes from a recently delivered pallet. The boxes contained roughly 100kg of cannabis.
The Socialist politician has stated that he was merely assisting his neighbour as a favour, something he said was common in the social housing building where he lives, and that he was unaware of the contents.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, if it was grass or hash,” he told the newspaper La Capitale.
The police went on to search his apartment and seized his phone.
“I proved my innocence,” he said after his release, in remarks reported by La Capitale and the Brussels broadcaster BX1. He spent one night in custody before being freed.
Mukiza said at that stage that a deputy prosecutor had accepted his account and that no case would be brought against him.
The Brussels prosecutor’s office later clarified that he has been charged with importation of narcotics in association and membership of a criminal organisation.
He was released under conditions. Four other individuals in the same investigation have been placed under arrest warrants.
Police had been tracking the shipment after customs at Brussels Airport in Zaventem raised concerns about a consignment on August 12. Officers then followed the lorry that delivered the pallet to the Ganshoren address.
They then arrested Mukiza, who has said he was held at gunpoint, pushed to the ground and handcuffed.
Ganshoren mayor Jean-Paul Van Laethem, of Les Engagés, has declined to comment on the substance of the case, which is under investigation. “I am simply glad to know that the judicial police is active on our territory,” he told RTBF.
PS+Citoyens governs Ganshoren alongside Van Laethem’s list and DéFI.
That zone recorded 475 arrests linked to drug trafficking in 2025 and 270 in the first half of 2026, according to figures reported by RTBF and BX1.
Neither Mukiza nor other representatives of the Ganshoren PS group responded to repeated requests for comment from RTBF. The investigation continues.
