A major trial involving 16 individuals suspected of leading a drug trafficking operation in the Brussels municipalities of Forest and Saint-Gilles in 2024 is currently underway.
The defendants are standing trial before the Brussels Court of First Instance. They have been charged with the sale and possession of narcotics. The gang carried out its operations between February and November 2024 at the Square Jacques Franck in Saint-Gilles, and later around Place Saint-Antoine in Forest.
The men are being tried with the aggravating circumstance of having used minors to run sales, even if most of the men on trial are also young.
"We are in a neighbourhood well known for drug dealing, namely the Saint-Antoine neighbourhood," the prosecutor said on Wednesday before outlining the charges against the defendants, which span seven and a half months.
The investigation began on 11 February 2024, she said, when Y.B. was stopped by the police with 140 bags of cocaine (42 grams in total), €1,500 in cash and a note in his phone "that looks like accounting". "There is little doubt about what it is used for".
The day before, the police had already caught him with 90 bags of cocaine, then released him to keep an eye on him. During his second arrest, Y.B. admitted that the money in his possession came from the sale and that he was supplied with the goods.
Saint-Gilles mayor Jean Spinette (C) pictured at the scene of a shooting incident in a bar in Saint-Gilles, Brussels, Thursday 27 June 2024. Two men were killed and three more seriously injured. Credit: Belga
"We are therefore clearly dealing with an organisation," insisted the representative of the Public Prosecutor's Office.
During the trial, no suspect admitted to being a member of a criminal organisation involved in the sale of narcotics.
"I didn't do any of that, I didn't sell drugs," replied one of the defendants to the judge who confronted him with the results of the police investigation (field observations, CCTV footage, searches, wiretaps, messaging service records).
Four defendants partially admitted to some of the charges. "I'm not a leader, I was just a supplier, a reloader," said one of the young men (now 22), referring to the status of "organisation leader", attributed to ten of the sixteen defendants.
The same defendant replied that the bag of 28 rounds of ammunition found at his home during a police search had been left there the day before by a friend and that he was supposed to "keep them overnight", but nothing more.
Another defendant admitted to selling cannabis, but not cocaine, denying being part of an association. A third admitted to possessing substances, but denied selling them or working as part of an association.
Finally, a fourth defendant, whom the judge asked for an explanation for the €28,765 found at his grandmother's home during a search, remained very evasive. "It's possible that I gave something to someone else," he said in response to his role as "sales point security" mentioned by the investigators.
Two of the four men who admitted on Friday to some of the charges against them also explained that they were caught in a spiral of debt linked to an addiction to sports betting.
Money made
A confiscation of the equivalent of €750,000 for all sixteen defendants has been requested by the prosecutor. This is a hypothetical estimate of the amount illegally received by the sixteen defendants based on the offences listed in the public prosecutor's indictment.
The prosecutor is also seeking between 30 months and seven years in prison, depending on their profile, degree of involvement in the association and responsibility for the alleged offences.
To arrive at this amount, the public prosecutor based her calculations on police observations which mention, for this group of defendants, an average of 32 sales per hour, divided abstractly into two blocks: 16 sales of cannabis (€10/pack) and 16 sales of cocaine (€50/pack) per hour.
A policeman pictured at the judgment session in a drug trial. Credit: Belga
She then explained to the court that she had multiplied this amount by five hours of sales per day and seven months of sales, "which gives a total of €1 million in illegal assets calculated by my office," she said on Wednesday.
This sum was then revised to €750,000 in the public prosecutor's closing speech presented on Wednesday. "And that seems to me to be well below the reality," concluded the prosecutor, after emphasising in her closing speech the profit motive and the dangerous nature of the drug trafficking currently taking place in Brussels.
The trial continues.
