First of all, I admit that I used ChatGPT to write this text because It was far easier for me to summarise a lot of news articles.

Between 1982 and 1985, the “Brabant Killers” (Bende van Nijvel) carried out a series of ultra-violent robberies and mass shootings in Belgium (and one attack in France), killing 28 people and injuring dozens more. Despite huge investigations, no one was ever convicted and the case became Europe’s biggest cold case. For decades, public attention focused on far-right plots and rogue gendarmes. Yet from the very beginning, there was also a far more prosaic lead: a small cross-border criminal crew from Charleville-Mézières in France, notably two brothers, Thierry and Xavier Sliman.

A Belgian investigator, Jean-Pierre Adam, has worked on this “French Ardennes” track for at least 25 years, gathering elements linking the Slimans to early witness descriptions, ballistics, the murder of a Belgian taxi driver, and even a burned photograph found near the final crime scene. Long ignored, this lead is finally being taken seriously. In 2024–2025, Belgian courts ordered new investigative acts, Le Parisien published a long-form multi-article investigation on the case, and in November 2025, a forgotten procedural report about a mysterious blonde woman in a burned photo was rediscovered. A hearing has also been held on exhuming the Slimans’ parents for DNA comparison. The case remains officially unsolved — but perhaps not for long.

1. What were the Brabant Killings?

Between 1982 and 1985, a still-unidentified group carried out a series of extremely violent robberies and shootings, mainly in the Belgian province of Brabant, with one earlier attack just across the border in France. The group became known under several names: the Brabant Killers, Bende van Nijvel, and Les tueurs du Brabant. Their attacks targeted everyday places – supermarkets, an armory, restaurants, a jewelry store, even private individuals – and they opened fire not only on police but also on ordinary shoppers, including children.

In total, about 28 people were killed and around 22 injured. What shocked investigators and the public was the sheer brutality compared to the relatively small financial gains. The total loot across the years is usually estimated at the rough equivalent of about €185,000 in today’s money – hardly the payoff one would expect for such a sustained campaign of mass murder. The same weapons and stolen vehicles kept appearing across multiple crime scenes, indicating that one core group operated over several years rather than a series of copycats.

Witnesses repeatedly described three key figures: “the Giant,” a very tall man who seemed to act as a leader; “the Killer,” the main shooter, noted for his cold, methodical demeanor; and “the Old Man,” an older participant often seen driving. The attacks traumatized Belgium and unfolded against the backdrop of the broader “Years of Lead” in Western Europe, when far-left and far-right terrorism, secret services, and clandestine “stay-behind” networks like Operation Gladio were widely discussed. That political context heavily influenced how the case was interpreted – and helped push more mundane criminal hypotheses, like the French Ardennes gang, into the background for decades.

2. Brief timeline of the attacks

The series is usually traced back to 14 August 1982, when a small grocery store in Maubeuge, France, just over the Belgian border, was robbed. The attackers stole food and wine, then opened fire on French police officers who responded, seriously wounding one of them. This attack, initially treated as a relatively minor cross-border robbery, is now considered the starting point of the Brabant Killers’ operations.

On 30 September 1982, the gang escalated dramatically by hitting the Dekaise armory in Wavre, Belgium. Two gunmen stormed the shop, stole a bag of handguns (including Colt and Smith & Wesson models), and killed a policeman, Claude Haulotte, during their escape. Ballistic analysis later linked some of the weapons stolen that day to subsequent attacks, tying together what might otherwise have appeared to be isolated crimes.

In late 1982 and early 1983, the violence continued. A hotel keeper at the Auberge du Château in Beersel was found bound and shot eight times. Shortly after, Brussels taxi driver Constantin Angelou was murdered: shot in the head and hidden in the trunk of his Mercedes. Around the same time, a string of increasingly brutal robberies began targeting Delhaize supermarkets. Customers and staff were shot in parking lots and inside the stores, including people already lying face-down on the ground. More robberies followed in 1983–1984, hitting other supermarkets and a jewelry store, and leaving multiple victims dead.

The final wave came in 1985. On 27 September, the gang carried out near-simultaneous attacks on Delhaize supermarkets in Overijse and Braine-l’Alleud, killing five people, among them a 14-year-old boy. Witnesses reported a commando-style group arriving in a VW Golf; one attacker wore a rubber mask of French politician Jacques Chirac. Then, on 9 November 1985, they launched their deadliest and last known strike at a Delhaize in Aalst. In just minutes, eight people were killed, including a father and his teenage daughter. After Aalst, the gang simply vanished from the public record.

In 1986, weapons and other items later linked to the crimes were recovered from a canal near Ronquières and woods near Braine-le-Comte. The locations and condition of the finds suggested the killers had deliberately dumped evidence after the final attack. Despite huge investigative resources, hundreds of suspects, and even a parliamentary inquiry, no one was ever convicted. Serious investigative failures – lost or mishandled evidence, jurisdictional disputes, and botched handling of vehicles and crime scenes – are now openly acknowledged, and they likely contributed to the case remaining unsolved.

3. The big theories that went nowhere

3.1. The “Borinage gang”

In the mid-1980s, Belgian investigators concentrated on a group of small-time criminals from the Borinage region, allegedly led by former gendarme Michel Cocu. Under intense interrogation, some members reportedly confessed to involvement in the Brabant crimes, and at one point a ballistic report was said to link them to a weapon connected with the attacks. For a while, this “Borinage track” looked like it might finally crack the case.

However, later review of the evidence exposed major problems. A German ballistic analysis contradicted the supposed weapon match, and this inconvenient report appears to have been suppressed by prosecutors. Even more damning, members of the Borinage group were in custody when one of the Brabant-linked double murders – the killing of a jeweler and his partner in Anderlues – took place, which should have ruled them out. At their 1988 trial, all of the accused were acquitted, saying they had been fed details and coerced into false confessions. The “Borinage gang” theory was effectively discredited.

3.2. Far-right/Gladio/gendarmerie conspiracy

Another major line of inquiry, which became extremely popular in public opinion, linked the Brabant Killers to far-right extremism and shadowy security networks. Suspicions focused on the far-right group Westland New Post (WNP), elements of the Belgian gendarmerie, and the stay-behind network SDRA8 associated with Operation Gladio. For many Belgians, the idea that the massacres were part of a “strategy of tension” – violent operations designed to justify more police powers – was more plausible than a purely criminal gang.

Several elements fed this view. The killers repeatedly targeted Delhaize and other supermarkets: symbolic “soft targets” where civilians were guaranteed to be present. At Aalst, the attack took place even though police patrols were known to pass regularly nearby, and local gendarmes were criticized for failing to intervene effectively. Some far-right militants were known to have done surveillance of Delhaize stores. Years later, a former WNP member was publicly pointed to as possibly being “the Giant,” though no charges followed. A parliamentary inquiry examined these suspicions but concluded there was no hard proof that Gladio, WNP, or state security structures had directed the killings, even if parts of the investigation were mismanaged. The conspiracy theory remains influential in media and online discussions but has never produced evidence solid enough for court.

3.3. Other suspects

Beyond these main tracks, dozens of other suspects came and went. At various times, attention focused on a Romany armed robber who half-confessed before retracting his statements and failing to provide verifiable details; on corrupt police officers; and on various local criminals who fit some aspects of the psychological or physical profile. Most of these leads were quickly dropped after basic checks. By the late 2010s, the Brabant case file had grown to millions of pages. Many people had been investigated, but no single theory convincingly accounted for the extent of the violence, the operational sophistication, and the complete absence of successful prosecutions.

4. Enter the Sliman brothers from Charleville-Mézières

Against this background of failed leads, a different theory has gradually come back into focus, centered on two French brothers from Charleville-Mézières in the Ardennes: Thierry and Xavier Sliman. Thierry, the younger brother, was first convicted at 17 for a series of armed bank robberies across eastern France in 1974 and sentenced to eight years in prison. Already as a teenager he was described by police, jurors, and psychiatrists as extraordinarily cold – someone with the mentality of a “killer.” In the decades that followed, he became a feared figure in the local underworld, involved in robberies, extortion, prostitution, and high-stakes poker.

Thierry was known for his unnerving calm, his serious reading habits (including legal texts), and his ability to manipulate psychiatric assessments to his advantage. His older brother Xavier officially worked as a plumber and heating technician, but he was also obsessed with weapons. He collected firearms, frequented militaria fairs in both France and Belgium, and was well known in those circles. Xavier had a distinctive limp from a motorcycle accident, and one of the victims in the 1982 Dekaise armory robbery remarked that one of the gunmen walked in a noticeably unusual way – a detail that would later take on new significance.

Both brothers amassed serious criminal records and were repeatedly suspected – though never convicted – in several violent cases in France. These include the murder of poker player Patrice Lacaze in 1990, who was shot and dumped in a reservoir, and the 1996 murder of bar owner Michel Piro near Charleroi, a man involved in prostitution and notorious for keeping big cats in a private “zoo.” In the Piro case, the victim’s wife, Véronique Laurent, admitted ordering the killing and named Thierry Sliman and an associate as the hitmen. She was convicted; the men were acquitted for lack of hard proof. Thierry died of lung cancer in 2011, and Xavier died during heart surgery in 2019. Legally, they remain innocent of the Brabant killings – but they are now at the center of a serious investigative debate.

5. The very early French lead that was… dropped

The link between the Slimans and the Brabant file actually appeared very early, but was effectively buried for decades. On 7 October 1982, just days after the Dekaise armory robbery in Wavre, an anonymous man walked into a Belgian gendarmerie post in Hastière. He said he recognized the photofit of one of the Wavre gunmen: in his view, it was a French weapons collector without a regular job, living in Charleville-Mézières – Xavier Sliman.

The Belgian gendarmes contacted their French counterparts in Charleville. The French police confirmed that Xavier had a bad reputation and added a crucial detail: both Xavier and Thierry had abruptly vanished from town for about a month around that time, roughly covering the period of the Maubeuge grocery robbery and the Wavre armory raid. Belgian investigators then showed photographs of the two brothers to four key witnesses from Wavre: the armorer, a restaurateur, a shopkeeper, and another witness. Three out of four said that Xavier resembled one of the gunmen.

However, when a more formal line-up was organized, the witnesses stopped short of giving a definitive identification. They spoke of a resemblance but not a 100% positive match – unsurprising given the stress of the original events and the time that had passed. The investigators summarized the exercise as “quasi-negative” and concluded that Xavier should be ruled out. Since Thierry was usually his accomplice, they effectively cleared him as well. The “French lead” was put aside.

Crucially, there was no serious effort to verify Xavier’s alibi, which was simply that he had been having lunch at his parents’ home in Charleville. No international arrest warrant was issued, and no systematic attempt was made to trace the stolen Dekaise weapons in French criminal circles. The initial report about the anonymous denunciation and early checks disappeared into the massive case file. When an internal review was carried out in 2018, the reviewers concluded that apart from those brief steps in 1982, there was no sign of any thorough follow-up on the Sliman brothers. A 2011 police memo claiming that the French track had been extensively investigated was described as misleading. The reviewer bluntly recommended that the French lead should be reopened – but for years, almost nothing was done.

6. Jean-Pierre Adam’s 20-year obsession

One person who refused to let this go was Belgian investigator Jean-Pierre Adam. A gendarme who later joined the federal police, Adam had worked on the infamous Marc Dutroux case in the 1990s. While investigating the 1996 murder of bar owner Michel Piro in Charleroi, he traveled to France and asked to consult the file on Thierry Sliman at the Police station in the city of Reims. In the basement archive, he opened the Sliman dossier and immediately noticed something astonishing: on the very first page was a photofit from the Belgian Brabant Killers investigation, specifically from the 1982 Dekaise attack. On the next page was a photo of Xavier Sliman, whose face closely matched that composite. No one in Reims could explain who had inserted the Belgian material or why.

Intrigued, Adam began to dig. He tracked down the old 1982 anonymous denunciation naming Xavier and the partial identifications in Wavre. He noted that some Brabant witnesses had mentioned one killer with a French accent and another with a birthmark on his neck; Thierry reportedly had such a mark. He also realized that Angelou, the Brussels taxi driver murdered in January 1983, had been killed with a handgun later linked to other Brabant crime scenes – and that Angelou moved in poker circles overlapping with people connected to the Slimans.

Adam wrote detailed memos to the official Brabant investigation cell in Charleroi in 1999, 2000, 2001, and later, laying out his concerns and suggesting lines of inquiry. According to him, and later internal reviews, these memos were largely ignored, partly because the “French track” did not fit the dominant narrative focusing on far-right plots and rogue security services. After retiring, Adam continued his research on his own time. He regularly traveled to Charleville-Mézières, meeting former associates, ex-partners, and bar owners, and even attended Xavier’s funeral in 2019 to confirm his burial.

Over time, Adam became convinced that Thierry was very likely “the Killer,” the main shooter, and that the Sliman brothers were part of a small Franco-Belgian crew behind at least a substantial portion of the Brabant murders. Not everyone who knew the brothers agrees completely: one former associate, for example, believes Thierry was involved but insists there was also a political dimension, possibly tied to far-right networks, whereas Adam sees the motivation as primarily criminal – money, gambling, and drugs. Frustrated by the lack of official follow-up, Adam eventually self-published a detailed, police-report-style book summarizing his findings. In 2023, he contacted French lawyer and former investigating judge Patrick Ramaël, who had been a magistrate in Maubeuge when the first Brabant-linked robbery occurred in 1982. Ramaël read Adam’s work and decided the lead needed to be tested with modern tools, especially DNA.

7. The Angelou taxi, DNA, and the exhumation fight

One of the pillars of Adam’s argument is the murder of Brussels taxi driver Constantin Angelou in January 1983. Angelou was shot several times in the neck from behind, likely by someone sitting in the back seat of his taxi. His body was discovered four days later in the trunk of his Mercedes. When investigators examined the car, they found cigarette butts in the rear left ashtray, which were preserved as evidence.

According to reporting and Adam’s reconstruction, ballistic analysis linked the weapon used in Angelou’s murder to other Brabant crime scenes. If DNA from the cigarette butts could be matched to Thierry Sliman, it would strongly suggest that he was physically present in at least one of the core Brabant-related attacks. The problem is that Thierry was cremated in 2011, so no direct DNA sample from his remains is available.

Adam and Ramaël therefore proposed an indirect solution: exhuming the bodies of the Sliman parents, or at least their mother, in Charleville-Mézières to obtain familial DNA. Investigators could then compare this partial profile with the DNA recovered from the Angelou taxi cigarette butts. A match would not automatically prove that Thierry pulled the trigger, but it would place someone from the Sliman family in that car. A non-match would seriously weaken Adam’s theory.

This proposal is at the heart of a current legal battle. In April 2025, the Court of Appeal in Hainaut (Mons) ordered a new series of investigative steps after victims’ families and Ramaël challenged plans to close the case. Among the measures was explicit mention of pursuing the “French Ardennes” lead, although exhumation was not in the initial list. Later in 2025, a hearing in Mons was held specifically to address whether the Sliman parents could be exhumed for DNA analysis. As of now, the final decision on that request has not been reported. Several relatives of victims, such as the daughter of banker Léon Finné (killed in a 1985 Delhaize attack), have publicly supported the idea, emphasizing that even a negative result would at least answer one major question after forty years of uncertainty.

8. The burned photograph and “the blonde woman”

Another striking piece of the puzzle comes from the days of the final attack in Aalst. On the afternoon of 9 November 1985, around 1:30 PM – just hours before the Delhaize massacre – hikers in the Bois de la Houssière, near Braine-le-Comte, discovered a makeshift burn site known as “Mon Idée.” When Belgian gendarmes inspected the area, they recovered several items from the ashes: gun magazines, a weapons catalog, partially burned checks later identified as having been stolen in the Overijse Delhaize robbery on 27 September 1985, a cigarette butt, and fragments of a burned photograph.

The photo remains were particularly intriguing. They showed a man in a blue checked shirt, though his face was mostly destroyed by fire, and a blonde woman whose face was missing but whose hair and general outline were still visible. Early on, the Brussels forensic lab apparently tried to identify this woman, and at some point her likeness was matched to an identity photograph of a woman named Véronique Laurent, born in 1960. This identification was mentioned in a summary report in 1990 – but then essentially disappeared into the enormous case file and was never seriously followed up in the main investigation.

For decades, almost nobody outside a tiny circle seems to have been aware of this link. Only very recently did it come back to light: in November 2025, investigators and journalists rediscovered the original procedural report (PV) documenting the match to Laurent. That rediscovery transformed what had been a forgotten footnote into a central element of the current debate.

Véronique Laurent is the same woman who was later convicted of ordering the 1996 murder of her husband, bar owner Michel Piro, in which she accused Thierry Sliman and his associate Patrick Verdin of being the contract killers. She was closely involved in the Charleroi/Ardennes underworld as a barmaid and prostitute and moved in the same milieu as the Sliman brothers. The fact that a burned fragment of a photograph apparently depicting her was found at a clandestine campfire where items clearly tied to previous Brabant attacks were dumped, and on the very day of the final massacre, strongly suggests a link between her social circle and the killers’ logistics.

Belgian media now describe this photo fragment as a “bomb” in the investigation because it provides a rare, tangible bridge between a known associate of the Sliman circle and a core Brabant dump site. The crucial point is that this link was known in 1990, then lost in the paperwork and only rediscovered in late 2025, which says a lot about how chaotic the file became. The fragment does not conclusively prove who carried out the attacks in Aalst or elsewhere, but it makes it much harder to argue that the French Ardennes underworld had nothing to do with the case.

9. What about motive?

Even if one accepts that the Sliman brothers and their associates might have been involved, an obvious question remains: why would they commit massacres of this scale for what appears to be relatively modest financial gain? Two broad explanations are usually discussed, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The first is essentially criminal. In this view, which is broadly the one Jean-Pierre Adam favors, the Brabant attacks were a series of high-risk robberies carried out by an exceptionally violent gang whose members had a constant need for cash to fund gambling, drugs, and a lifestyle totally disconnected from any legal income. Seen from that angle, the “excess” violence is not part of some sophisticated political blueprint but simply the way this crew operated: intimidate everyone, shoot quickly, eliminate witnesses, and assert total dominance. Thierry’s reputation as someone capable of killing without visible emotion fits disturbingly well with that scenario, and the overlaps with poker circles and other underworld disputes suggest that at least some killings may have doubled as score-settling.

The second explanation is more political. Some underworld figures have claimed that at least one of the Slimans was connected to the French SAC (Service d’Action Civique), a Gaullist "militia" known for dirty tricks and covert operations. From that perspective, the Brabant massacres could have served as a “strategy of tension”: brutal acts intended to terrorize the population and justify greater budgets and powers for the police and security apparatus during the Cold War, when far-left and far-right extremism were real concerns. This narrative is also used to explain why parts of the investigation seem to have been sabotaged or neglected, and why certain pieces of evidence appear to have gone missing.

At this stage, there is no public, decisive proof for either interpretation. It is entirely possible that both contain elements of truth: a very violent criminal gang might have been opportunistically used, tolerated, or later shielded by political or security interests. But until new documents or testimonies emerge, this remains speculative. What the “French Ardennes” track does show, however, is that you do not necessarily need a grand geopolitical conspiracy to explain the killings: a small, ruthless cross-border gang could, in principle, account for much of what happened.

10. Where the case stands today

Despite being over forty years old, the Brabant Killers case is not frozen in time. In March 2024, Belgium changed its law so that crimes of this gravity became imprescriptible, meaning the Brabant murders would no longer automatically become time-barred in November 2025 as previously scheduled. On paper, that removed the deadline that had long been hanging over the investigation. Yet in June 2024, the federal prosecution still announced its intention to wind down the active investigation, arguing that no genuinely new leads had emerged. Victims’ families reacted with anger and filed appeals.

By early 2025, the official tone had shifted. Belgian federal prosecutors publicly acknowledged the existence of a “new lead” and insisted that the criminal probe was still ongoing. Without naming it explicitly, they were widely understood to be referring to the French Ardennes / Sliman track. In April 2025, the Court of Appeal in Hainaut (Mons) ordered a set of new investigative acts, including specific work on this French lead. That court decision effectively forced the authorities to reopen a path that had been present in the file since 1982 but largely ignored.

By late 2025, things had moved into a very concrete legal phase. A dedicated hearing in Mons examined whether the bodies of the Sliman parents in Charleville-Mézières could be exhumed to obtain familial DNA for comparison with the profile from the Angelou taxi cigarette butts. Victims’ lawyer Patrick Ramaël argued that refusing such a relatively simple test amounted to “manufacturing a cold case” by choice rather than necessity. Families of several victims publicly supported the exhumation, emphasizing that even a negative result would at least close one chapter.