In Mons, the trial of a group of men who stole 2 million litres of kerosene from an underground pipeline owned by NATO began on 5 September, with seven defendants appearing before magistrates in the criminal court.
As previously reported by The Brussels Times, in September 2019 members of an organised crime gang were arrested for having stolen the fuel by constructing a 270-metre-long tunnel to tap into the pipeline, syphoning around 40,000 tanks worth of the valuable fuel over several years.
The pipeline, originally created during the Cold War to supply aircraft at NATO bases in western Europe is still in use by allied forces. The men are alleged to have used a complex American-made drilling rig to tap into the pipeline and syphon fuel into a separate underground container, before then running the fuel to a former industrial site, where it was pumped into tanker trucks.
Military authorities noticed that the amount of fuel in the pipeline had significantly depleted, but chalked the losses up to a leak. On further investigation, the theft was discovered and two tankers containing the stolen kerosene were stopped by police on the E42 motorway near the site.
An daring robbery
Lawyer Frank Discepoli, in a comment to Belgian media RTL Info, said that the scale of the theft had been impressive.
“You have to realise that they went through 270 metres and passed below the railway, and below the Ravel (pedestrian highway). They arrived at the back of their building and from there, installed pumps, pressure reducers…put in valves. All this without anyone knowing because it was absolutely invisible from the outside,” the lawyer said.
In the criminal case against the organised crime group members, the Belgian State is the civil party. The state estimated that the damage caused by the gang totalled €2.4 million.
One of the defendants’ lawyers, Nasredine Benzerfa, claimed that one member the group was a migrant worker who was tricked into the crime and was unaware of the group’s plans.
“He (the defendant) has no role. He is a simple executor. He came as part of a job search and got a job. It was his role to work as a mechanic,” the lawyer said.
A not-so-secret pipeline
It is still uncertain what the criminal gang intended to do with the stolen fuel, which was ultimately being trucked across Europe to Greece. The group is composed of suspects from across Europe, with varied backgrounds.
It was all intended to end up in Greece, indeed they were a big, big organisation,” Discepoli said.
The hearing for the criminals concluded at the end of Monday and the fates of the perpetrators of the crimes are set to be determined by the end of the month.
The military pipeline is an open-secret among local residents, and it is not the first time that it has been targeted by underground groups.
In the early 1980s, home-grown Belgian terrorist group, the Communist Combatant Cells (CCC), planted bombs at five locations along the length of the pipeline, causing damage to part of NATO’s Central Europe Pipeline System, which provides fuel to NATO garrisons.
In a gaff in 2015, the location of the pipeline was published openly online on the website of Beporbel, the professional association of Belgian firefighters.
