On January 18, 2022, we learned with horror of the death of our brother Ayoub Ayoubi under circumstances that still need to be clarified.

As a reminder, Ayoub, a young man without a valid residence permit in Belgium, was reportedly found dead in his home in ASSE, a municipality located in the Flemish region, on January 18, 2022.

The family, informed of Ayoub’s death through the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Morocco, acknowledged the information and demanded an immediate viewing of the body of the deceased.

Following this, Ayoub’s brother went to the funeral home that was keeping his brother’s body. During the trip, his brother reminded the consul’s collaborator that they had had no news of Ayoub for seven days. At the sight of his brother’s body, Mohamed could not believe his eyes. There were traces of blows to the face, wounds at the metacarpal level, broken wrists — injuries that recalled to us the sad service rendered by a police accustomed to inhumane treatment of populations from immigrant backgrounds.

From that moment, Ayoub’s brother, accompanied in his actions by his lawyer, Maître Nicolas Cohen, activated all procedures to finally obtain access to the file.

After an initial informal request made to the investigating judge, a petition was ultimately filed to definitively obtain this access.

Furthermore, information coming from Morocco following a parliamentary question posed by Noureddine Médian, head of the Istiqlal parliamentary group, makes us even more worried about the real circumstances of Ayoub’s death. Indeed, the Moroccan Ministry of Justice took the initiative to communicate with the Belgian authorities through the Moroccan liaison magistrate in Belgium. This communication, part of the international judicial cooperation between Belgium and Morocco, reported the following information:

After contacting the public prosecutor’s office of the Halle-Vilvoorde judicial district, the latter reported that a criminal investigation was underway, the results of which have so far led to the following:

On the night of January 11 to 12, 2022, the deceased’s neighbors heard abnormal noises and cries in the apartment he lived in.

When the police entered the apartment, the person in question was deceased.

A forensic pathologist was appointed to work with the scientific and technical laboratory of the judicial police to determine the causes of death.

The competent public prosecutor concluded, based on the forensic pathologist’s findings, the state of the apartment and the neighbors’ testimonies, that the death was due to the effects of excited delirium syndrome.

According to the competent prosecutor’s testimony, the aforementioned syndrome can result from drug consumption, the consumer becoming agitated, which explains the state of cries in which he was found according to the neighbors’ testimony and the state of the apartment, and that the autopsy that will follow the results of the analyses, whose results are not yet known, will be able to confirm this.

These new pieces of information worry us again because they recall circumstances of death similar to those of Josef Chovanec, who on February 24, 2018, was refused boarding on a flight to Bratislava because he allegedly behaved too turbulently (— statements held by the airport police zone). The federal airport police were then called to restrain the man, who had rebelled on the tarmac. Placed in a cell in the federal police premises, the man reportedly inflicted violent blows upon himself, forcing the police to intervene again to restrain him. During this operation, the man suffered a cardiac arrest. The prosecutor then spoke of excited delirium syndrome, as a corollary of excessive drug consumption, to justify the proportionality of the police intervention.

It is clear that a person’s physical and mental state at the time of their arrest can, by a perverse reversal, later serve as a justification for their own death in narratives prepared by the police, constructed by the investigation and affirmed by the prosecutors. We had tangible evidence of this with the murder of Jozef Chovanec who, during a police intervention on February 24, 2018, died from an 18-minute thoracic suffocation induced by the ventral restraint applied by police from the Charleroi airport zone. The medical report at the time mentioned a severe cerebral edema, consequence of a cranial shock attributed to Mr. Chovanec’s unilateral action. In addition, the Charleroi prosecutor’s office investigation into the circumstances of Jozef Chovanec’s death cites excited delirium syndrome as the cause that justified the nature of the police intervention. According to the police, they had no other choice but to intervene forcefully, for their own protection and to prevent the suspect from rebelling. This card of rebellion, like that of the inherent dangerousness of the Black body, of the Arab body, which systematically justifies the level of force used, is continuously mobilized in police narratives, corroborated by inquiries and communicated by the media. In the specific case of Jozef Chovanec, although he was neither Black nor Arab, it was from the sensitive and technological framework of state racism that his body was treated. This framework primarily serves to racially saturate all relations between common perception and the trial of reality during any eventual court proceedings. Added to this is the use of the strategy of psychiatrization of the effects of police violence, which is symptomatic of countless sequences of police killings; a police officer sat on Chovanec’s thoracic cage for 18 minutes, but this element is overshadowed by the construction of the narrative of the pathological threat he represents. Furthermore, this delirious agitation constitutes an irrevocable element of verification of the subject’s guilt. This ostensible process of spontaneous disappearance of the violent nature of the police intervention allows the biological and psychic fixation of responsibility for the effects resulting from the intervention on the part of the victim. The ready-made justification in the elaboration of the police narrative will be that of protecting the victim from himself and of protecting those around the scene. (https://bruxelles-panthere.thefreecat.org/?p=5047)

This attempt to reverse the burden of proof requires particular attention from us and specific actions to counter the prosecutor’s narrative.

To this end, we ask you to intervene financially so that a counter medical expert examination of the body of Ayoub Ayoubi can take place in order to clarify, within a reasonable timeframe, the medical circumstances of his death.

His family asserts that Ayoub did not use drugs, so it would be impossible for them that this cause led to his death.

Let us be many to support the family by contributing to this fund.


Truth and Justice for Ayoub Ayoubi