The Belgian federal prosecutor’ office is to begin an investigation into the death in mysterious circumstances in Moscow of businessman Bruno Charles De Cooman, which we reported earlier in the week. De Cooman was in the Russian capital working for a major steel company, one of the top five in the country and owned by the Russian oligarch Vladimir Lissine.
De Cooman was found at the bottom of the luxury apartment building (photo) across the Moskva river from the Kremlin where he lived on the ninth floor. According to Moscow police, his body showed the “characteristics of a fall from a great height”. There were no signs of a struggle within the apartment, police said.
According to a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, it is standard procedure for the deaths of Belgians abroad to be handled by the federal office, which allows the best contact with other countries’ judicial system. “The prosecutor’s office has at this time no evidence of foul play,” a spokesperson said. “We are at the moment in an information-gathering phase.”
The dead man’s mother, Marie-Madeleine Meunier, is convinced something is not right. De Cooman, she said, came back to his apartment on Wednesday afternoon with a friend, who remained downstairs while De Cooman went upstairs. Moments later he fell to his death. She rules out the hypothesis of suicide: “He was a deeply faithful man; he would never do such a thing, she told the Belang van Limburg. Someone was waiting inside the apartment, she speculates, overcame him somehow and threw him from the window.
The investigation, now closed on the Russian side, continues in Belgium.
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
