“At one point in 2022, it was so bad that an entire wing of the Antwerp prison was full of Dutch people,” said Franky De Keyzer.
March 14, 2024 12:29 pm CET
Around half of the criminals arrested for drug-related offenses at the port of Antwerp are from the Netherlands, according to the chief of the city’s Public Prosecutor’s Office.
“Of the 150 people we caught in the port in 2023, about 50 percent came from the Netherlands,” Franky De Keyzer told Dutch newspaper NRC in an interview published Wednesday. “That’s been the case for years.”
De Keyzer, who has been the head of Antwerp’s Public Prosecutor’s Office since 2019, told the outlet that Dutch people are increasingly involved in violent drug-related crimes too. In 2023, 69 of the overall 151 arrests for drug-related violence were of Dutch origin, he said.
This is not a new phenomenon. “At one point in 2022, it was so bad that an entire wing of the Antwerp prison was full of Dutch people,” he said.
The Belgian port city of Antwerp has become a doorway to smuggling cocaine into Europe and has witnessed a stark increase in drug-related shootings and explosions. Belgian authorities seized a record 121 metric tons of cocaine in the port of Antwerp in 2023, according to customs statistics released by Belgian police.
“The ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp are 75 kilometers apart,” De Keyzer said. “For drug criminals, that’s one area.”
Last week, five Dutch teenagers were arrested at the port of Antwerp, as they were reportedly looking for a consignment of cocaine. Police also recently arrested two suspects in the Netherlands over a drug-related shooting which killed an 11-year-old girl last year.
De Keyzer said the people arrested are mainly from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. While there is good cooperation at the “operational level” with Dutch authorities, the prosecutor said “at the tactical and strategic level there is still a lot of room for improvement.”
“In an ideal setting, we work with mixed teams of police officers and magistrates, based on a joint plan,” he said. “Then we bring information together, which our analysts work on together.
“Criminal organizations move very smoothly in a European market that no longer knows borders,” he added. “In the field of investigations, those boundaries should be removed much more than they are now.”