A so-called hackathon, in which specialists from various police and security services look for information about fugitive criminals through public sources such as websites, has already led to a third arrest, in Colombia.
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On the start day of the hackathon, a first arrest was made on a farm in Sauvenière, a sub-municipality of Gembloux, in the province of Namur. This is reported by the federal police. It involved a man who escaped from a prison in North Macedonia in 2021 and was wanted by North Macedonian authorities. Since the man had previously lived in Belgium, there was a chance that he was hiding in Belgium.
Last Friday a second man was arrested: the fugitive DM ran into a lamp in Manchester, just before he wanted to take a plane to Pakistan. He is suspected of an attempted murder in Brussels in 2018.
That same day, a third arrest followed in the Colombian capital Bogota. It concerned a fugitive who was sentenced in absentia to 7 years in prison by the Brussels Court of Appeal. The man was convicted of international drug trafficking and membership of an international criminal organization.
During the hackathon, the third detainee had already been located in South America. Further investigation in the days following the hackathon allowed “to map his escape route and travel route bit by bit,” the federal police said.
The hackathon was intended to track down 40 fugitive criminals. The organization was in the hands of the Fugitive Active Search Team (Fast) of the federal police. Such initiatives are still in the pipeline and pave the way for closer cooperation during investigations, it says. The main resource used during the hackathon is open source intelligence or open source research. Because no matter how hard they try, at an unguarded moment, fugitives will sooner or later leave a trail somewhere, the police say.
“It was the first time that the security services used such innovative solutions to go after fugitive criminals together,” said Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open VLD). ‘It shows that close cooperation between all services is the basis for effective and thorough investigative work.’
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