The Brabant Killers: Belgium's Unsolved Spree of Military-Grade Terror

Between 1982 and 1985, an unidentified gang murdered 28 people and injured 22 in a series of violent raids across Belgium, often for tiny hauls of cash and pantry staples. Known as the Brabant Killers or the Gang of Nivelles, they combined paramilitary tactics with seemingly amateur mistakes, and the case remains unsolved. This episode unpacks the contradictions, the theories, and the institutional collapse that followed.We set the scene in Cold War Belgium and the heavily armed Gendarmerie whose tactics, ammunition, and stolen weapons kept surfacing in the case. We trace the crimes from a barracks burglary to the 1985 Aalst supermarket attack where the Van de Steen family was executed in the parking lot, and we examine the underworld theory around ex-gendarme Madani Bouhouche alongside the strategy-of-tension theory linking the attacks to extremist groups.The professional-grade car modifications and bounding overwatch formations witnesses reportedThe neo-Nazi WNP group that admitted scouting the targeted supermarkets, noting these are reported theoriesThe disputed canal weapons cache and the 2019 arrest of the detectives who searched itThe case closure in 2024 and surprise reopening in 2025 over two new witnessesHow the scandal led to the abolition of the Belgian Gendarmerie