A Belgian businessman shot dead outside his home in Athens a week ago has been identified as 47-year-old Kristof Waegeman, implicated in drugs trafficking through the port of Antwerp and sentenced to 12 years in absentia for dealing drugs.
Waegeman was shot last Friday evening around 21.00 by two men, believed to be contract killers, as he left his home in the exclusive suburb of Voula to get into his car.
His wife described him as a consultant to a company in Athens. According to the Gazet Van Antwerpen, however, he was known in the drugs underworld, and was sentenced in 2015 a drugs case to 12 years in prison, which he never turned up to serve.
The court at the time identified him as the leader of a criminal organisation that imported cocaine on a grand scale through the port of Antwerp, from where it could be distributed throughout Europe.
Waegeman was also identified as one of the key figures in the so-called Makreel case, named after the code name of one of the principals – Makreel or Mackerel, in real life Nordin E.M., whose brother Abdullah, who now lives in Dubai, was code-named Black.
Waegeman showed up in that case under a pseudonym of his own, Geert Nelle, registered as a director of a company that provided containers that were used to smuggle drugs.
That case, coincidentally, also revealed links between Waegeman and Jan Van Zandtvoort, another Antwerp drugs kingpin who was found murdered in Spain in 2016 after being missing for years.
Another figure in the case, the British-Belgian Martin “Billy” Meech, was more recently shot dead in Mexico by two moped gunmen – a favourite tactic of urban hit-men – before the eyes of his Brazilian wife and their German shepherd.
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
