Belgium mourned on Sunday after a vehicle ploughed into a crowd of early morning carnival-goers, killing six people and injuring dozens of others, but the authorities ruled out an act of terrorism.
The tragedy took place at about 5am 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 La Louviere 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. They were not known to the authorities for similar acts.
Chief Prosecutor Christian Henry said the two were coming from a nightclub “and had just dropped off another person just before the events.”
Blood test results were expected yesterday 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 said.
“The facts have been qualified as murder, but we will see what the investigation will reveal and if we should requalify the thing as manslaughter,” 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 vehicle coming from behind at high speed literally pulverized a large number of people,” he said.
Witnesses described a horrific scene of a vehicle that drove into a group of carnival-goers that included children.
Fabrice Collignon, a Belgian TV presenter, told reporters that the procession was under way when in a “snap of the fingers we went from fun and folklore to absolute horror.”
The vehicle seemed to “deliberately crashed [sic] into the crowd,” Collignon said.
Another witness, Theo, told RTBF news that he saw a vehicle that moved “very fast and didn’t brake.”
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