Detainees rape and torture cellmate: man in life-threatening condition taken to hospital

The victim was filmed being tortured and raped.

The Antwerp court has started an investigation into torture practices in the prison on Antwerp's Begijnenstraat. Detainees allegedly abused and raped a cellmate for days, after which the victim had to be taken to hospital in life-threatening condition. His torturers call him a “pedophile”: although he is not currently in prison for sexual offences, he has been convicted in the past of raping a minor. The public prosecutor's office requests the arrest of the suspects for attempted murder, rape and torture.

"I made mistakes. I will pay on Monday,” screams a black and blue naked man, as he looks desperately into the camera of his tormentors. “You are now going to pay in kind. Are you going to pay a lot in kind?" they ask. The victim is then seen screaming while his cellmates rape him with a broomstick. The cellmates are having fun, while the victim on the floor is clearly in pain.

It is one of the most disgusting fragments of images taken in recent days in the overcrowded Begijnenstraat prison, and which started circulating in the crime scene on Tuesday evening.

The videos show some detainees torturing their new cellmate. The man's face is beaten to a pulp, and the man is forced to strip naked. The torturers also force the man to eat a sandwich with their feces.

Dangerously injured

According to his fellow prisoners, the man was a pedophile. According to prison sources, the man was currently serving a two-year prison sentence for assault and battery, and therefore not for pedophilia. According to our information, he may have once been convicted of raping a minor.

The torture victim, named RJ, was taken to hospital in a life-threatening condition on Tuesday evening after the prison discovered what had happened in the cell. He also reportedly suffered severe burns.

“Never seen such serious violence”

In an internal letter to the staff and the unions, director An Janssens writes that she has never experienced such a serious case of violence among detainees. The five suspected torturers have been distributed to other cells pending investigation. The cell where the victim was tortured for up to three days has been sealed for trace evidence.

“What the judicial qualifications are with regard to the cellmates, and who has what role in these very serious and degrading facts, must become apparent from the investigation currently in the hands of the Antwerp public prosecutor's office and conducted by the local police investigation department of Antwerp.” , Minister of Justice Paul Van Tigchelt (Open VLD) reported in a response on Wednesday. “The prison system has also started an internal investigation to determine whether all applicable procedures were correctly applied.”

Trade unions: “Defies all imagination”

The torture practices allegedly started before the strike, but continued during and after the strike without anyone noticing. Or without anyone having intervened.

The prison unions will hold a press conference on Wednesday about the case that “defies all imagination”. According to the unions, the affair is a direct consequence of years of government mismanagement of prisons. “A direct consequence of what we as trade unions have been shouting from the rooftops for years: 'This is going wrong!' The overcrowding and understaffing of staff has created a horrific scene about which we, the representative trade unions, would like to hold a press conference.”

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