Onderzoek zet gezicht op CCC – Drukkook-bom ontploft niet te Schaarbeek

De Mammoet-zoektocht [opgestart op 19 oktober 1984] van de rijkswacht naar de daders van de bomaanslagen die de voorbije weken door de CCC werden gepleegd, lijkt zijn vruchten af te werpen. De gerechtelijke politie heeft een opzoekingsbevel uitgevaardigd tegen Pierre Carette, een drukker die al enige tijd is vermits. Dezelfde speurders onderzoeken de snelkookpan die de rijkswacht-combi had moeten opblazen.

Bron: Het Laatste Nieuws | 6 november 1984

Terrorists put benign Belgium under mental siege

Enveloped by bodyguards, the Justice Minister of Belgium hurried out of his office building and into the darkened square dominated by the Palais de Justice on the other side. A telephoned bomb threat had emptied the ministry.

''We cannot take any risks,'' said the Justice Minister, Jean Gol, who is also Deputy Prime Minister. He spoke in an interview in the middle of the square here, which had suddenly filled with police vans, black-uniformed bomb squad experts and men in plainclothes who snapped on red arm-bands.

In December, Mr. Gol announced that four presumed leaders of a terrorist band called the Fighting Communist Cells had been arrested in a fast-food restaurant in Namur. ''But,'' he cautioned, ''we have seen in other European countries that terrorist movements have been born again like the phoenix.''

The Belgians, who a century ago abolished the death penalty and live in one of the few Western industrial democracies that do not permit telephone tapping, find themselves these days in something like a mental state of siege. They have recently been shaken by two home-grown terrorist bands - one of the left, the other savage but ideologically mute.

27 Bombings in 14 Months

The capture in December of Pierre Carette, a 33-year-old printer, and three of his comrades appears to have severely cut into the strength of the Fighting Communist Cells, which over 14 months claimed responsibility for 27 bombing attacks on multinational companies, banks and NATO installations, including a strategic oil pipeline.

From the Saint Gilles prison here, the four issued a communique acknowledging their membership in the Fighting Communist Cells and calling for ''a resumption of combat'' so that ''the spark sets the plain ablaze, so that the class struggle burns down history.'' But so far whatever militants remain at large - Mr. Gol said he thinks they are no more than a score - have done nothing more incendiary than call in bomb threats that have turned out to be false.

According to several people who knew him before he went underground in 1984, Mr. Carette was a Leninist visionary who repeatedly broke with other tiny leftist factions, regarding them as foolish or traitorous. But Mr. Carette, described by those who knew him as a cold, lonely and haughty man, seemed to have exercised a certain charisma over a small band of younger disciples.

''He considered himself a soldier of the revolution,'' said Michel Graindorge, a Brussels lawyer who knew him in the late 1970's through a defense committee for imprisoned members of the West German Red Army Faction. ''Pierre never talked about love, happiness, art. For him it was the revolution.'' Worked With French Terrorists

Around 1982 in Brussels, Mr. Carette is said to have encountered two exiled founders of the French terrorist group Direct Action, Jean-Marc Rouillan and Nathalie Menigon, and a French revolutionary theorist named Federic Oriach. Briefly joining forces, the two bands staged holdups to raise money and shared, with remnants of the Red Army Faction, 1.760 pounds of dynamite stolen in 1984, according to Belgian and West German investigators.

In his printing plant on the Rue d'Albanie, Mr. Carette also turned out communiques for a shadowy group called the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions, which in 1982 assassinated a second secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Paris. This connection has led Belgian officials to explore possible links to Abu Nidal, the leader of an anti-Arafat Palestinian group that has carried out terrorist attacks in Belgium and boasted of ties to the Fighting Communist Cells.

While intrigued by Mr. Carette's international connections, Mr. Gol said the group appeared to be primarily a Belgian phenomenon. The terrorist leader, whose father is a member of the Belgian criminal investigation police and whose brother is a paratroop officer, appears to have broken ideologically with the Red Army Faction and Direct Action and did not sign a ''Euroterrorist'' communique issued by the two groups in January 1985.

''He had a megalomanic desire to bea revolutionary star,'' said Andre Dartevelle, a Belgian television journalist who has closely studied Mr. Carette and his terrorist group.

'Politics Replaced by War'

''In his vision, politics is always replaced by war. There are those who are correct - the revolutionary vanguard - and the rest, the bourgeoisie, the traitors, the unions. It is a perversion of Leninism, a revolutionary messianism - bizarre, magic, if you will.''

For many peaceable people on Belgium's far left, the isolation of the Fighting Communist Cells was its most striking quality. Initially the group's communiques prompted some leftists to criticize it as a right-wing band masquerading as Leninist. Solidaire, a Belgian Maoist publication, once ran a headline referring to the group by its initials in French, CCC: ''CCC: Pronounce it CIA.''

''The CCC are politically isolated, swimming against the current, ''commented Roger Noel, a 30-year-old printer and anarchist who spent four and a half months in a Polish jail for smuggling a radio transmitter to Solidarity activists. ''In Belgium, the social movements of the left are now in a moment of defeat. This sort of action was seen as a kind of revenge.''

Some contend that it is not accidental that the terrorist group has its roots in French-speaking Wallonia, whose smoke-stack industries have been most sharply hit by what is known simply as ''the crisis.'' Mr. Carette comes from the stricken steel city of Charleroi, and a number of his sympathizers were young drop-outs on the fringes of Brussels' theater and university life.

A Relatively Low Toll

Yet, while the group exalted violence, its actions took only two lives-two firemen called in to defuse a booby-trapped car parked in front of the Belgian employers' association on May 1.

By contrast, a gang known as ''the killers of Brabant'' has killed 27 people, many of them women and children, in attacks on supermarkets and other public places since 1982. The professionally executed shotgun attacks and the inconsequential booty taken by the Brabant killers have persuaded some investigators that they may be a far-right commando group, perhaps composed of former policemen or military men.

Bron: The New York Times | 6 februari 1986

Inderdaad. Toch wel raar dat er niets over gezegd wordt in die actualiteitenrapporten van de CIA. Nochtans werden de overvallen van de Bende van Nijvel en de paniek die deze veroorzaakten in november 1985 wel beschreven in de Amerikaanse pers. Zelfs de mogelijke link tussen de CCC en de Bende van Nijvel werd er toen aangekaart.

Belgium is shaken by bombs and 'Crazy Killers'

A spate of banditry and terrorism has shaken this normally tranquil, relatively prosperous country of 10 million to its core.

On Wednesday Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, whose center-right Government was re-elected last month, placed six companies of the Belgian Army - about 1,000 soldiers - at the disposal of the police to help thwart terrorism and other crimes.

The Government also increased security at embassies, public buildings and big businesses for President Reagan's visit to brief Western allies on the Geneva summit meeting. Nonetheless, a terrorist group known as the Fighting Communist Cells exploded a bomb at Motorola's European headquarters in Brussels, causing heavy damage. In the last 13 months the Fighting Communist Cells has taken responsibility for at least 24 bombings of banks, commercial offices and North Atlantic Treaty Organization centers.

But of far greater concern has been a series of holdups by a gang that since 1982 has slain 27 people, including women and children, most of them during robberies at supermarkets. The most recent incident - and the most violent to date - was an attack on the evening of Nov. 9 at a Delhaize supermarket in Aalst, 16 miles west of Brussels. Six adults and two children were killed when three gunmen, wearing ski masks and carrying pump shotguns, blasted their way into the market, spraying shoppers with fire. The robbers made off with only $3,700.

'Not Their Primary Motive'

"It's obvious that theft is not their primary motive,'' asserted Lode Van Outrive, a leading criminologist at Louvain University. ''Undermining the police and destabilizing the country appear to be their major goals."

The gunmen have been dubbed the "crazy killers of Brabant", the province that includes Brussels.

Justice Minister Jean Gol said two weeks ago that the Government could not rule out a link between the Communist Cells and the supermarket gang. But the existence of such a link is doubted by most experts. Jean Depretre, the prosecutor who heads the Government's investigation of the supermarket slayings, said in an interview that he believed the armed robbers, unlike the Communist Cells, were after money. He also said that unlike the supermarket gang, whose numbers he estimated at 4 to 10, the Communist Cells had tried to avoid killing people.

"The CCC is a classic terrorist group," he said, using the initials by which the gang is known in French. "The gang is Jesse James, or Bonnie and Clyde."

Despite intensive efforts by Belgium's three police forces - 550 autonomous local police units, a gendarmerie and a judicial police force - as well as a small anti-terrorist force, the authorities conceded they have little idea who is carrying out the bombings and attacks or why.

An Effect on Business

The resulting fear is palpable. It is also affecting business. At 4 P.M. on Tuesday, a Delhaize supermarket in Uccle, a middle-classsuburb, was bustling with shoppers. By sunset, an hour later, it was deserted. "We have zero shoppers at night," said Pierre Dumont, a spokesman for Delhaize Freres, a Belgian-based company that has been the target of most of the raids. "All the supermarkets are deserted at night. People are simply too afraid to shop after dark." He said no one knew why Delhaize stores had been chosen as targets.

Mr. Depretre, the prosecutor, asserted that location made Delhaize stores tempting targets: the raids were carried out at stores on or near main highways, insuring a speedy getaway.

Division in Authority Cited

Mr. Van Outrive, the criminologist, asserted that Belgium's police forces suffered from poor financing and poor training, but most of all from divided police authority.

On Sept. 27, he noted, the gang stole $20,000 and killed eight people in 20 minutes in holdups at Delhaize stores about 10 miles apart in the towns of Braine-l'Alleud and Overijse. An alert issued after the first raid did not reach the neighboring police jurisdiction until the second holdup was over.

Bron: The New York Times | 21 november 1985

Dank aan de getuige om die info met ons te delen.