Thug is filmed killing his dog by dragging it behind his car at 50mph for several miles - before online vigilantes track him down in Belgium and burn down his house in ‘attempted murder'
Horrific footage shows the lifeless German Shepherd hanging from its leash while being towed at 50mph across a road in Belgium.
The sickening video, taken on July 4, quickly went viral after it was posted on Facebook by a shocked witness named Victoria.
Although the driver's license plate was obscured, users were quickly able to identify him and find out where he lived.
The thug received numerous hate messages, and a petition with over 50,000 signatures was launched demanding 'justice for the dragged dog.'
But, the case took a more serious turn on Monday morning after appalled animal lovers decided to take the law into their own hands, tracking down the thug before burning his house to the ground in an 'attempted murder'.
Serge Fillot, the mayor of Oupeye, the town where the dog's owner lives, said: 'I was called around 3.00 or 3.30am.
'I was told that the dog owner's house had been set on fire. Fortunately, he managed to get out on his own.'
Horrific footage shows a lifeless German Shepherd hanging from its leash while being towed at 50mph across a road in Belgium
He said that action against the man was 'unacceptable' even if the dog's death was 'cruel' and 'tragic'.
'If someone deliberately set fire at night while someone was in the house, that's attempted murder,' Fillot told German media outlet RTL.
The residence was also spray painted with the words 'Dog killer'.
'We will secure the premises, and measures will be taken to protect this person, both at their workplace and at their home,' added the mayor.
The Public Prosecutor has opened a separate investigation into the arson attack.
'An expert has been requested to determine the cause of the fire,' it stated. 'The initial investigation suggests that it was arson committed at night while people were present in the home.'
The perpetrator of the arson faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Both investigations are continuing, both into the animal abuse and the arson charges.
According to initial findings from the investigation, the dog's owner went to the Hermalle police station on Saturday morning and claimed that his dog found itself in this position after jumping out of the window without him realizing it.
Victoria, who witnessed this scene of 'unbearable cruelty' firsthand, recounted in the Facebook post that she repeatedly honked her horn to make the animal's owner stop.
'He finally stopped his vehicle and approached me, asking if I was the one honking,' she said.
Victoria then asked him if he thought it was normal to treat her dog like that.
'I do what I want, it's my dog,' the man allegedly replied, before taking the animal off its leash and 'throwing it in the trunk of his car like a common thing.'
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Eight years on, the undiagnosed condition that may explain why no one believed Chloe Ayling after she was snatched by a madman, injected with ketamine and held captive
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So outlandish was the sequence of events she described – and crucially how odd her unemotional retelling of the story was – that to this day, eight years on, questions still abound about whether she was complicit in the kidnap and it was all an elaborate publicity stunt. Could the BBC documentary airing tonight finally silence the online commentators and conspiracy theorists? Including interviews with British and Italian police officers who were involved (and some of whom admit they too doubted Chloe's story at first), the three-part series offers an interesting new theory. It suggests Chloe's lack of emotion, both during the kidnap and in media interviews afterwards, was the result of immaturity and nervousness at finding herself in the public eye – but also of undiagnosed autism. Towards the end of the documentary, she actually receives a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, which she says explains so much – not just about her reactions during her kidnap ordeal, but about her life before and since. 'I had a lot of difficulties with communication,' she explains in the documentary, while poring over childhood pictures. 'I'd react in the wrong way. If I was being told off I would smile. I just had the wrong reactions to things. 'My mum would come with me on school trips because I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted or express how I was feeling. For ages I just said I'm not an emotional person, but now I realise that no matter now hard I try, I just can't [express emotion].' In hindsight this was never more apparent than Chloe's attempt to communicate what had happened to her when she returned home to the UK. What a catastrophe that was. She admits: 'The aftermath affected me more than the kidnap.' 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'I can't really be mad at people for not understanding, when I didn't really understand it myself,' she concludes. Chloe's diagnosis is a development that makes complete sense to her former manager Phil Green, who appears in the documentary reliving the horror of having to deal with hostage demands. Phil, who had been a lawyer before setting up a modelling agency, met Chloe when she was 19 and told me this week while the attractive teenager was clearly ambitious ('her goal was to have 100,000 followers on Instagram'), she wasn't a typical model-about-town. 'She didn't seem to have many friends, and didn't hang about with the other models. She lived at home with her mum,' he says. Unusually, for someone starting off in modelling, she also had a baby son 'who would only have been about one at the time,' remembers Phil. The child lived with his father, Chloe's ex partner Conor Keyes. 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2 hours ago
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The real story behind viral video of French farmer getting rid of travellers by spraying them with manure... and why he had to take action
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
The huge cartel cocaine 'mother ships' that constantly circle Britain: Inside the cat and mouse battle on the high seas between drug lords and special forces
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Border Force's maritime unit has more than two dozen vessels on patrol including cutters, RHIBs and jet skis. Gangs smuggling drugs by sea often rope in otherwise ordinary people to carry out their dirty work. This was shown in the recent case prosecuted at Truro Crown Court, which included a Hampshire fisherman who had been facing financial difficulties. He was joined by three Essex men who are believed to have been planning to sell the drugs in the south-east of England, and a Colombian who is alleged to have been acting as security for the drug cartel. Jurors heard that the conspirators had been due to collect 20 bales of cocaine from the sea after they had been dropped there by a cargo ship. The prosecution said the drugs were brought from South America on a cargo vessel across the Atlantic and were dumped in water tight bales into the sea in the English Channel. The bales were fitted with GPS tracking devices attached to Apple air tags so that they could be recovered from the sea by the smaller vessel and transported to mainland Cornwall. But despite the technology, the three men on the boat only managed to find eleven bales but dumped them during the chase. They were Scott Johnston, 39, Peter Williams, 43, both from Hampshire, and 32-year-old Colombian Tabora Baca, 32. Baca - who claimed to be a tourist who had accepted a boat invitation from two strangers to go fishing - was the Spanish speaking link between the higher figures in the operation and had flown into the country on several occasions. The other conspirators were arrested at later times after National Crime Agency investigators trawled through CCTV footage, phone call data and phone messages. Alex Fowlie, 35, of Chichester; Bobbie Pearce, 29, of Brentwood, Essex; Michael May, 47, also of Kelveden Hatch, Essex; and Terry Willis, 44, of Chelmsford, Essex, helped plan and organise the cocaine smuggling operation and pick up. Gangs dumping drugs at sea after they realise police have been monitoring them is a common tactic to try and evade prosecution. In some cases, these packages have washed up on beaches, including in Cornwall and Sussex. Tom Chandler, a leading UK expert on drug cartels, told MailOnline that yachts or fishing boats transporting drugs can also get into trouble in stormy weather and sink, leading to drugs being washed ashore months later. In September, a black holdall containing around 40kg of the Class A drug was found on the sand at Trevaunance Cove in St Agnes on the north coast of Cornwall. An image taken outside Schooners bar overlooking the cove showed a police officer talking to members of the public beside the bag, while a lifeguard monitors the beach. Another haul, weighing 30kg and believed to be worth around £2million, washed up in 2023 on a beach in Goring, West Sussex. Separate incidents involved a fisherman finding hundreds of kilos of cocaine floating near two Dorset beauty spots, St Aldhelm's Point and Durdle Door, and litter pickers stumbling across discarded packages on the Isle of Wight. Border Force takes sniffer dogs with them to sea to detect drugs on any intercepted vessels. In January, a springer spaniel called Flash sniffed out a £50million haul of cocaine on a ship that had been intercepted off the coast of Dover. The haul, which had been hidden among bananas, had been packaged up in sealed bags fitted with trackers - ready to be flung overboard and later recovered. Senior Border Force Director, Duncan Capps, said: 'Border Force officers remain one step ahead of the criminal gangs threatening our border security as we continue to make record breaking seizures to keep deadly drugs off our streets. 'Our message to these criminals is clear – more than ever before, we are using intelligence and international law enforcement co-operation to disrupt and dismantle smuggling operations. 'We will continue to work with law enforcement to ensure those caught smuggling will face the full force of the law.'
