Joe Van Holsbeeck

Joe Van Holsbeeck was a Belgian 17-year-old who was murdered on 12 April 2006 at Brussels Central train station. This murder, following the attempted theft of an MP3 player, took place at approximately 4:30 in the afternoon, during rush hour. Although petty theft is not uncommon, and even violent robberies are not unheard of in Belgium, Van Holsbeeck's murder in a crowded train station during the daytime shocked many Belgians at the time. The two perpetrators, who were later arrested, turned out to be Romani juveniles.

The murder took place around 16:30 hours (4:30 p.m.) on Wednesday 12 April 2006 in the crowded main hall of Brussels Central railway station. Joe Van Holsbeeck, a 17-year-old Belgian high school student, and one of his friends were approached by two youths of about the same age. According to reports, the assailants at first asked for directions, but suddenly tried to take off with the victim's MP3 player. When Joe Van Holsbeeck resisted non-violently, he was stabbed five times by one of the two. Van Holsbeeck was then taken to hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries a couple of hours later. Two suspected assailants fled the station. Initially, Belgian media erroneously reported them as being of Moroccan descent. They were arrested some two weeks later and identified as Polish citizens.

As the murder took place during rush hour in one of Brussels' busiest places, a major commuter train station serving the downtown core area, there were hundreds of people present at the station. However, nobody intervened to prevent the crime or to intercept the suspects. Police ultimately interviewed thousands of commuters at Central station over the next day in the hope of obtaining more clues as to the identity of the perpetrators.

Both suspects (plus, perhaps, the murderer's 24-year-old elder brother) had been recorded on very clear CCTV footage in front on the Central Station. One week after the murder, on 19 April, the Brussels police issued a description and a police artist's drawing (identikit) of the two principal suspects as well as some CCTV footage taken by the station's security cameras. According to news website HLN.be, this delay was due to the police not wanting to aggravate pre-existing racial tensions or cause a witch-hunt against the North African community (to which the suspects were first believed to belong), although this was not confirmed by the state prosecutor's office.

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Wikipedia