Five shootings in Belgium this month have spiked concern about gun violence, drugs and gangs.
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The first two weeks of February saw at least five individual shootings in the capital city of Brussels, leaving two dead and several injured. While local police said the incidents weren’t connected, they did share a common link.
“Officials said they all had the hallmarks of drug-related violence, not terrorism,” the Associated Press reported following the fourth shooting on Feb. 7. That incident was one of the shootings that ended in a fatality.
The city’s Anderlecht and St. Josse neighborhoods have been the epicenter of the recent violence. However, Justice Minister Annelies Verlinden told the AP that police presence needs to be universally increased.
“A lot of people work here, visit us. And the reality of the past days forces us to take absolutely good care of Brussels,” Verlinden said. “Criminals are extremely flexible, so if we don’t have (police) everywhere, we will fix nothing because the problem will just move somewhere else.”
Recent Shootings in Brussels Have Been Linked to Drugs and Gang Activity
The country’s port city of Antwerp is just 35 miles (55 kilometers) north of the capital. Officials say the port has been another hot spot for violent gang activity due to cocaine importing.
In fact, in 2024, the BBC reported that Antwerp has become Europe’s main port for South American cocaine. Authorities seized 116 tons of the drug in 2023, a 5% increase from 2022 — and that’s likely just a small fraction of the drug that made it to the port.
Drug and gang crime has inevitably trickled down to Brussels, as the country’s largest city.
Most recently, on Feb. 15, a 19-year-old man was shot dead in Anderlecht.
“Our initial inquiries lead us to believe that the incident occurred in the context of a settling of scores within the milieu of drugs trafficking,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement, per Reuters.
Another drug-relaed shooting, near a Brussels metro station on Feb. 5, crippled the local transit for several hours as police searched for a suspect.