Criminals Roam Free

The daring robbery of the Glasgow-London mail train in 1963 counts among the most celebrated crimes of the 20th century. The British police succeeded in tracking down the gang of robbers, but their leader, Ronald Biggs, escaped from prison fter only a year. Now a resident of sunny Brazil, he will probably never be put behind bars again. Another case that cannot be closed is that of the 'mad killers of Brabant', who terrorised Belgium in the early 1980s. These pitiless killers left no clues to their identity.

On the night of August 9, 1963 the mail train from Glasgow was moving through London's outer suburbs. Aboard the train, driver Jack Mills was looking forward to reaching his destination, Euston Station. Strangely, the signal on the bridge at Sears Crossing indicated red, so Mills brought the train to a stop, and fireman David Whitby got out to find the reason for the delay. At the next telephone post, the line was deah. On his return to the train, a pair of armed men knocked him hown. It was the prelude to ghe greatest robbery in British history.

A group of 15 gansters had planned the heist with military precision. They unhitched the locomotive and the first two coaches, and forced mills to drive the short train well ovr a kilometre away. The postal clerks in the mail-sorting coach were put out of action and 120 mailbags were loaded into trucks waiting under a bridge. The thieves netted 2.6 million pound in used banknotes - equivalent to US37.5 million today. Little of this was ever recovered.

At first, the police found only a few clues. Nevertheless, over the next five years they arrested one train rober after another. Only Ronald Biggs, supposedly the head of the gang, managed to escapae from prison, in 1965. He found refuge in Brazil. After his whereabouts becam known, British police repeatedly demanded the extradition of the fugitive, but he claimed the right of custody for his child, whose mother was Brazilian. In Vovember 1997, the Supreme Court of Justice in Brasilia, Brazil's capital, ruled that Biggs's offence was committed too long ago to be punishable under Brazilian law. The fugitive Briton will probably enjoy a happy retirement in his host country, and often appears in interviews and to advertising spots. In the late 1970s Biggs even made a record with British punk rockers, The Sex Pistols.

Furious Murder

The Great Train Robbery appeared almost harmless compared to the brutal wave of terror that swept over Belgkium in the early 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985, a series of attacks took place on supermarkets in the Walloon (French-speaking) region of Belgium. The perpetrators soon becam known as the 'mad killers of Brabant'. They used modern weapons and equipment, and their attacks were planned in great detail. But they seemed to consider their loot less important than the murder of innocent people. Blind with rage, the robbers shot cashiers and customers, even children.

Their last atttack was on the Delhaize supermarket in the town of Alost on November 9, 1985, when the criminals shot and killed eight people. The dead included a woman and her daughter who were shot while they sat in their car. The takings from the robbery were ridiculously small, but the shooting brought the death toll to 28 - all victims of arbitrary violence.

The Belgian police never managed to arrest the killers. However, the case took a dramatic twist when a certain Philippe de Staercke, who was serving a 20-year sentence in a Brussels prison, announced that, in 1985, he had led the gunmen in three of the supermarket attacks. Six teen people were killed in these assaults. When he was questioned about the motive for the crimes, De Staercke said he and the others had acted 'out of ideological reasons'. In a bizarre twist, he alleged that the orders for the attacks had come from Belgian politicians and top police commanders. De Staercke refused to divulge any names, and so these grisly crimes remain unsolved.

0 comments:

Post a Comment