Limburger Yvo T. will be told on Monday by the court of assizes in Tongeren how much punishment he will receive for the shooting of a Belgian police officer in 2018. A twelve-member public jury convicted the 40-year-old man from Schinnen last Friday evening for manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. The latter because after shooting 37-year-old Amaury Delrez on August 26, 2018, he had also shot four times at his then colleague, Ghislain Schils (58). However, it was not hit.
Together with his brother and friend, T. had visited the qualifying of the Grand Prix in Francorchamps near Spa, in which Max Verstappen also participated. This was followed by a night out, which got out of hand after excessive drinking and drug use. During a conflict in bar Havanna in Spa, people saw that Yvo T. was carrying a firearm. The police were called and officers Delrez and Schils stopped the taxi in which Yvo, his brother and the friend wanted to drive away. When Amaury Delrez pulled the reluctant brother Cyril out of the taxi and took him to the curb behind the police van, Yvo T. got out, walked up to the officer, pressed the barrel of his Walter P38 against the officer’s neck and pulled the trigger. . Delrez bled to death and died on the spot.
The other officer fired a shot and hit Yvo T. in the abdomen, but he fired back four times, whereupon Schils took cover behind a tree. T. fled, managed to stay out of the hands of the police for eight hours and, according to his own words, ‘lost’ his gun on the way, which was never found again. To avoid tracing by the police, he burned his cell phone in a fire pit, after first calling his parents to come pick him up. However, just before his father arrived, the police found him after a manhunt. He was in a chalet not far from where the fatal shooting took place that night.
After five days of trial, during which counsel for Amaury’s next of kin and colleagues tried to convince the jury that it was murder, the jury downplayed that charge to manslaughter, which carries a lesser penalty. Murder carries a life sentence, and manslaughter carries a maximum of 30 years. It will become clear on Monday how long T. must remain in the cell.