New lead emerges in cold case mass murder mystery: "We don't want to give up"

CBS News

28-01-2025

A decades-old probe into a murderous gang rampage that mystified Belgium could be opened again to chase an unexplored lead, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The cold case known as the "Crazy Killers of Brabant" revolves around two waves of deadly supermarket robberies carried out between 1982 and 1985, killing 28 people including children.
The suspects were reportedly three men who covered themselves in face paint during the raids and became known for their ruthless attacks, the BBC reported. Some of the victims were tortured before being killed.
The gang's members were dubbed the "The Giant," "The Killer" and "The Old Man," the BBC reported.
Theories piled up over the years to explain the crime spree -- with the sums involved tiny, and money an unlikely motive.
One seriously considered thesis was that it was a bid to destabilize the Belgian state by current or former law enforcement officers close to the far right.
Yet the case was never cracked, with prosecutors declaring it closed in June last year.
On Monday, however, an appeals court in the city of Mons sided with a civil party to the case who had asked for two additional witnesses to be heard.
"The court accepted the request for these witnesses to be heard," a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office told AFP, confirming a report in Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.
On November 9, 1985, when an attack on a grocery store in the Flemish city of Aalst left eight people dead, two brothers claimed to have seen six men in dark clothing fleeing the scene.
The boys -- aged seven and 10 at the time -- said they happened to have jotted down the car's registration number, a hobby of theirs at the time.
Their notebook was handed to investigators and logged in the case file, but the lead was not followed up and the brothers, now 47 and 50, were never questioned.
Although the probe was closed last year, civil parties to the case still had the chance to request additional investigative steps -- which several have since done.
"We don't want to give up," said Kristiaan Vandenbussche, a lawyer for relatives of victims of the Aalst attack who filed for the two brothers to be heard.
No one has ever been convicted in the case despite multiple overlapping investigations, countless fingerprint and DNA searches, dozens of exhumations and even arrests leading to charges.
In 2020, authorities released a new photo of a man who they said could be linked to the case, the BBC reported. In the picture, the unidentified man was seen posing with a shot gun in a wooded area.