“No one is allowed to touch your children”: thieves tie up Mireille’s 16-year-old daughter during home invasion | Faruk

Mireille and her two daughters live in a terraced house in a quiet residential area in Borgerhout. On the morning of August 30, Mireille leaves for work as usual. Her eldest daughter is on vacation. Her youngest daughter of 16 stays home alone. We call her Ellis. Mireille: “It was a rest day for her, because it was still summer holidays. Around noon she was watching Tiktok videos in her room.”

But while Ellis quietly gets ready while watching movies, two men break in through the front door. “They must have thought no one was home,” says Mireille. While the two men turn the whole house upside down, Ellis sits quietly in her bedroom on the top floor.

It concerns two men with dark hair. The first is heavily built and has a stubble beard. The second is very thin, wears glasses and is balding on top.

Suddenly Ellis hears footsteps on the stairs. “At that moment the door opens and there is a strange man in her bedroom,” says Mireille. Ellis panics, and the man is shocked too. He even gets angry: apparently the two thieves had rung the doorbell and Ellis should have ‘opened the door’. Then she must immediately come downstairs. There his companion is just busy searching the cupboards of the dressing room. “She had to lie on her stomach, and then they tied her with the cord of the hair dryer.”

While crying, Ellis does what the men ask her to do. The first thief seems to want to reassure the girl. He strokes her back and says ‘I’m a good man’. But that has the opposite effect. “That moment actually had the most impact for her, because she was very aware at the time: what else are they going to do?” says Mireille.

In the end, the two men calmly continue what they were doing. While Ellis is tied to the floor, they search the rest of the house. They only leave after about twenty minutes. Ellis can break free and immediately calls her mom. Mireille jumps into her car and drives back home. On the way, she informs the police.

“When I pulled up – I think I put my car in the middle of the road. It’s like running into some kind of movie script.” Meanwhile, Ellis is waiting for her mom in the police station. When she sees Mireille, she bursts into tears again. “At that moment you are only happy if you can hold her again,” says Mireille with relief.

Inspector Swannet of the Antwerp police is conducting the investigation. He finds the suspects several times on surveillance footage. “We have seen that they walk to the tram stop ‘De Preter’ at approximately 12:25 pm.” It is around the corner from Mireille’s house. They wait there for a while, then they get on tram 9 to the center of the city. They walk there for a long time. “On the camera images we see that they move very smoothly through Antwerp and that they don’t have to look for streets anywhere,” says Swannet. “That they know the area. So we suspect that they are from Antwerp itself, or that they know someone there they could go to.”

The last image that the police have of the two men is near the residential blocks on Van Kerckhovenstraat. Anyone who has seen the suspects, or has more information about them, would like to speak to the police. This can be done on the free number 0800 30 300 or by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

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