BELGIUM: Belgium mourned on Sunday after a car plowed into a crowd of early morning carnival-goers, killing six people and injuring dozens of others as authorities ruled out an act of terrorism.
The tragedy took place around 5 a.m. as the carnival of Strepy-Bracquegnies, a district in the former coal-mining town of La Louviere, was getting under way.
“At this stage of the investigation, we know that a vehicle slammed into a group (of carnival goers) and that there are six dead and 26 injured, including 10 people whose life is in danger,” prosecutor Damien Verheyen told reporters at the town’s city hall.
Investigators said the suspects were born in 1988 and 1990 and came from La Louviere, a town near the French border in Belgium’s rust belt, and were not known to authorities for similar acts.
Chief prosecutor Christian Henry said that the two were coming from a nightclub “and had just dropped off another person just before the events”.
Blood test results were expected on Monday and “will allow us to say if they have consumed drugs,” he told RTBF news.
“Nothing goes in the direction of radicalism or extremism”, he added.
Belgian towns and villages host many street carnivals around the season of Lent, with the parades in Binche and Aalst the best known internationally.
Like Binche, the carnival of Strepy-Bracquegnies involves participants dressed up as “Gilles”, extravagantly attired comical figures who are “called out” to the parade in the early hours.
La Louviere mayor Jacques Gobert said there were 150 to 200 people participating in the carnival’s pre-dawn prologue, including the “Gilles” in their garb.
When they reached a road, “a car coming from behind at high speed literally pulverised a large number of people,” he said at the news conference.
Witnesses described a horrific scene of a car that drove into a group of carnival-goers that included children.
Fabrice Collignon, a Belgian TV presenter, told AFP the procession was joyfully under way when in a “snap of the fingers we went from fun and folklore to absolute horror.”
The car seemed to “deliberately enter into the pack,” said Collignon.
Another witness, Theo, told RTBF news he saw a car that moved “very fast and didn’t brake”.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and other ministers rushed to the scene along with Belgium’s King Philippe, who met first responders in the Strepy-Bracquegnies sports hall, where the morning’s carnival procession began.
– JAPAN TODAY