Two women have died on the afternoon of September 13 at a house on Avenue de la Poésie in Anderlecht, one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, after a knife incident that the Brussels public prosecutor’s office has linked to one woman’s psychiatric problems. The woman suspected of stabbing the other before taking her own life worked at the European Commission.
Officers from the Brussels-South police zone, which covers Anderlecht, Forest and Saint-Gilles, were called shortly after 5pm. The prosecutor’s office said the alert came in at 5.04pm.
Officers found one woman seriously wounded inside the house and a second woman holding a knife. Back-up was requested.
Before they could disarm her, she jumped from a window. Paramedics tried to revive both. Neither survived.
A federal police forensic team, a medical examiner and an investigating judge were sent to the scene, along with a prosecutor.
The Brussels public prosecutor’s office said on September 14 that one of the dead appeared to have been a woman with psychiatric problems. It said the other was a friend and neighbour who had come to help her.
A lodger in the house, identified only as Angèle, told Flemish public broadcaster VRT she had called the police after her housemate’s behaviour changed sharply.
She said her flatmate had not been herself for several days. “When I came back from the shop, there was a large knife on the table. She was waving it about. I was scared.”
She said she tried to calm her. “Please, we will find a solution,” she recalled saying. “But she panicked.”
French-language outlets La Capitale and La Dernière Heure named the Commission employee as the homeowner and mother of two, and the stabbed woman as a neighbour and friend. Those names have not been confirmed by prosecutors.
La Capitale also reported, citing a resident of the street, that the homeowner had said that morning she was in danger and that she later returned to the house with her friend. Shouting was heard upstairs before the police were called, according to the same account.
The exact sequence inside the house before police arrived is still under investigation. Prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Veerle Byloos said officers could not stop the armed woman from jumping and that the circumstances were still being examined.
