The Brabant Killers Attacks (1982–1985)

Between 1982 and 1985, an unidentified gang later known as the Brabant killers (French: Tueurs du Brabant; also called the Nijvel Gang, or Bende van Nijvel) carried out a series of armed robberies and shootings concentrated in Belgium's Brabant province. By the end of the spree, 28 people were dead and 22 more had been injured, making the case Belgium's most notorious unsolved crime. Investigators believed the gang's active core consisted of three men, nicknamed the Giant (a tall man thought to be the leader), the Killer (the group's main shooter), and the Old Man (a middle-aged driver); none of the three has ever been identified, and the case remains formally unsolved.

The violence began with a December 1981 burglary of a Gendarmerie weapons store in Etterbeek and escalated through 1982 and 1983 into armed robberies of grocery and supermarket stores, a weapons dealer, and a restaurant, in which shop staff, customers, a taxi driver, a restaurant caretaker who was tortured before being killed, and police officers were killed or wounded. Proceeds were often modest — several raids netted less than $35,000 — and in at least one robbery nothing at all was stolen even though the owner was killed. After a roughly two-year lull, the gang carried out its deadliest attacks: on 27 September 1985, two Delhaize supermarkets were robbed within about twenty minutes of each other in Braine-l'Alleud and Overijse, killing eight people combined. On 9 November 1985, a raid on a Delhaize supermarket in Aalst left eight more dead, including three members of one family — Gilbert Van de Steen, his wife Thérèse, and their daughter Rebecca — while their nine-year-old son, David, was critically wounded in the same attack but survived. No further attacks have been attributed to the gang after 1985.

The investigation was hampered by lost physical evidence and rivalries among the Belgian agencies involved. A separate group of suspects charged early in the case had those charges dismissed after it emerged that an exculpatory forensic ballistics report had been withheld from the defense. Decades later, allegations surfaced that retired detectives who had led the original inquiry manipulated evidence connected to a 1986 discovery of weapons in a canal outside Brussels; the retired officers who had ordered that search were formally questioned in 2019.

Because nearby gendarme patrols did not intervene during the November 1985 Aalst robbery, media coverage and some authors have linked the attacks to NATO's clandestine stay-behind network in Belgium and to a since-disbanded far-right paramilitary group, theorizing a political motive behind the killings. An official parliamentary inquiry, however, found no substantive evidence that the stay-behind network was involved in the killings or had been infiltrated by criminal groups, and no such connection has been officially established.

Belgian authorities formally closed the investigation on 28 June 2024. In January 2025, prosecutors announced that a new lead had emerged and confirmed the criminal probe remained active; a court in Mons separately approved a request to hear from two additional witnesses who were present at the 1985 Aalst attack. The identities of the Brabant killers remain unknown.