The name of terrorist Abdesalem Lassoued was written in various ways in the databases of the Belgian police services. That made the research work difficult.
Tunisian terrorist Abdesalem Lassoued shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels on October 16 last year. A third was seriously injured. In the aftermath of the attack, the then Minister of Justice Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) resigned. It had emerged that a request from Tunisia from August 2022 to extradite Lassoued had remained pending at the Brussels public prosecutor’s office.
Committee P and Committee I, which respectively control the police and intelligence services in this country, then investigated whether glaring mistakes had been made in Lassoued’s succession. The confidential report from Committee P was submitted to Minister of the Interior Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) on Thursday. The French-language newspaper La Dernière Heure wrote on Thursday that the report had shown that “serious mistakes” had been made by the police services, which allegedly did not cooperate. But the Committee P report that De Standaard saw states “that at no time was it found that information was withheld between the services”.
Shortcomings
Committee P said it found several shortcomings, but said that none of these shortcomings were directly related to the attack. Committee P concludes that the attack could only have been avoided if Lassoued had been removed from our country, as the Tunisian authorities had requested in 2022.
According to the committee, not a single blatant error occurred in the police services in previous years. What it did establish is that searching the police databases is made more difficult by the different spellings of names of people of Arab origin in the databases. For example, Lassoued was either given the wrong surname in the various databases – Laswad – or his first name was written slightly differently: Abdessalem. Committee P calls for systems to be simplified and phonetic searches in databases to be made easier.
