A drug lord has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for torturing a 17-year-old and cutting their ear off.
On Monday, the Ghent correctional court sentenced Kristof D and fined him €800,000 for the torture methods used on the teenage boy.
His accomplice Jonas W was sentenced to five years in prison and fined €320,000. In January, he was sentenced to 17 years in prison by the Court of Appeal in Antwerp for kidnapping and torturing a Dutch drug criminal. The prosecution had demanded 22 years in prison for both main suspects.
In this case, the victim was tortured in April 2022. The then 17-year-old young man was tortured by a drug gang in the garage of a farmhouse in Maldegem (East Flanders) after he was wrongly believed to have tipped off a rival gang about a deal involving 300 kilograms of cocaine.
Among other things, the perpetrators cut off the teenager's left earlobe, severed the tendons of a hand and cut a piece off a toe.
The court described the victim not as an errand boy, but as someone who had "worked his way up at a tender age to become a valued member of criminal organization".
The young man did not take a civil side in the case.
Four people were arrested in November 2022, after examining camera footage near the hospital where the victim was dropped off. Kristof D became a primary suspected and was listed internationally. It was previously thought that he was in Dubai.
