“Yes, I am back home with my family, my wife and my two young children aged three and six.” That said Justice Minister Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) last night in the Dutch talk show Op1. The minister also went into detail about the circumstances surrounding the foiled kidnapping attempt more than two weeks ago. A photo that the Kortrijkzaan shared on Instagram this morning shows that he is doing well after the ordeal he and his family had to endure recently.
In the photo, Van Quickenborne poses next to his wife Anouk during a morning walk under a bright blue sky. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Thank you for all your kind words/messages/cards/phone calls/letters/flowers/… of support. Never surrender!” it sounds, among other things.
Yesterday, Van Quickenborne testified on Dutch television how he and his family ended up in a safehouse last month. “Shortly after I got back from New York (where he attended the UN General Assembly, ed.), I got a call from the federal prosecutor of the state prosecutor’s office,” said Quickenborne. “He called to say he had bad news for me and that I was being threatened.”
The phone call also shows that the threat could become concrete very quickly. Quickenborne advises you to take all the necessary measures yourself. “In the evening something very strange happened in our neighbourhood. An attentive police patrol stopped a car with a Dutch number plate, with four occupants in it,” says the minister. “The car was not known to the Belgian police, the occupants were also not signaled, but the officers on duty did record the personal data of the four,” says Van Quickenborne.
“The next day, on Friday morning, when I was at the mayor of Antwerp, a neighbor reported a car in front of her door. It turned out that that car (also with a Dutch number plate, ed.) had been stolen and that there were weapons on board that vehicle. That was a hundred meters from our door,” says Van Quickenborne. “Then everything went very quickly and we were housed in a safe house and the security measures were very drastic.”
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I explained to my children that naughty crooks wanted to take daddy with them.
“Naughty Crooks”
The Justice Minister goes on to explain how he had to explain to his young children, aged three and six, that “naughty crooks wanted to take daddy with them”. Even now, Van Quickenborne and his family are still “under close security”, says the minister, who hopes that his children will not be traumatized by this. He does not want to say much about the current research, which is being conducted together with colleagues from the Netherlands. “Everything points to it coming from the drug mafia. I think we have entered a new phase. That is the phase of narcoterrorism.”
It is still unclear whether the order for the kidnapping comes from the Netherlands, but the four arrested suspects are all Dutch. Three men aged 20, 21, 29 and 48 were arrested in The Hague and Leidschendam for the kidnapping attempt. At the end of this month, the International Legal Aid Chamber will decide whether the four suspects will be handed over to Belgium. They oppose it.
Today Van Quickenborne attends the European conference on tackling organized crime in Amsterdam. Ministers and representatives of Justice and Home Affairs from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Spain meet there to discuss tackling serious organized crime. Representatives of the European Commission, Europol and Eurojust are also present at the conference.
INTERVIEW. Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne from his safehouse: “We have arrived in a new situation: this is narcoterrorism” (+)
“No license to kill, but they are allowed to infiltrate and commit crimes”: Van Quickenborne now also lets State Security hunt for drug mafia (+)
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