The little girl would have received the fragments of a microwave oven, which exploded under the impact of bullets which targeted a house in this port city of Belgium.
An 11-year-old girl was killed on Monday January 9 in a house in Antwerp, Belgium, by a gunshot that could be linked to intimidation or settling of scores between drug dealersaccording to the authorities.
Mayor Bart De Wever linked this murder to “a drug war that has been going on for monthsin the big port city. “Criminals attack the houses of other criminals” and “what I feared for a long time has happened; an innocent victim fell, a child“, declared the elected official on Flemish television, assuring that “the affected family is known“.
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Reached by AFP, the Antwerp prosecutor’s office indicated that this track of the link with the drug world “is under investigation“. An investigating judge was seized for “murder“And went in the evening to the scene of the tragedy, in the Antwerp district of Merksem, said the prosecution.
Shards from a microwave oven
According to the first elements communicated by the police, the girl was on the ground floor of the house in a living room located behind the garage door targeted by the shooter(s). She would not have been directly hit by the shots but would have received the fragments of a microwave oven which exploded under the impact of the bullets, according to these elements reported by the Belga press agency. She succumbed to her injuries.
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Monday evening Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden lamented “a horrible tragedy“. “We will do everything we can to catch these ruthless criminals. Children have nothing to do with any drug war“, she added on Twitter.
The port ofAntwerp is the main route of entry into Europe of cocaine imported from Latin America, and the traffic generates increasingly violent crime which worries the authorities. The financial stakes are colossal and sharpen the rivalries between gangs, which are at the origin of shootings or throwing of targeted explosive devices. This violence is often seen as intimidation or acts aimed at directing the attention of the police to one family or place more than another.