An 11-year-old girl was killed Monday in a house in Antwerp, Belgium, by a gunshot that could be related to intimidation or settling of scores between drug traffickers, according to authorities.
Mayor Bart De Wever linked the killing to “a war on drugs that has been going on for months” in the major port city.
“The criminals are attacking the houses of other criminals” and “what I feared for a long time has happened: an innocent victim has fallen, a child,” the elected official told Flemish television, assuring that “the affected family is known.” .
The girl hit by shrapnel
The Antwerp prosecutor’s office indicated that this clue to the link with the world of drugs “is the subject of investigations.” An investigating judge was arrested for “murder” and went to the scene of the tragedy at night, in the Merksem district of Antwerp, the prosecutor’s office said.
According to the first elements communicated by the police, the girl was on the ground floor of the house in a room located behind the garage door at which the shooters aimed.
It would not have been hit directly by the shots but would have received the fragments of a microwave oven that exploded under the impact of the bullets, according to what these elements reported to the Belgian press agency. She succumbed to her injuries.
The port, the gateway to Europe for cocaine
On Monday night, Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden lamented “a horrible tragedy.”
“We will do everything we can to catch these ruthless criminals. Children have nothing to do with any war on drugs,” he tweeted.
The port of Antwerp is the main route of entry into Europe for cocaine imported from Latin America, and the traffic generates increasingly violent crime that worries authorities.
The economic stakes are colossal and sharpen rivalries between gangs, which are at the origin of shootings or the launching of directed explosive devices. This violence is often seen as intimidation or acts intended to direct police attention to one family or location rather than another.
Source: BFM TV
