Madani Bouhouche

Madani Bouhouche (14 June 1952 – 22 November 2005) was a Belgian gendarme, and associate of the far right who was convicted of two murders, but strongly suspected of committing a third and attempting several more. He organised a small circle of like-minded men of police and even professional backgrounds into a self-sufficient gang that carried out at least one multimillion-dollar robbery, and the initial stage of a bizarre extortion plot that included a notorious and still-unsolved series of multiple robbery-homicides. A lifelong gun fanatic, he repeatedly retained and then was caught with illegal weapons that implicated him, with his final downfall coming when he shot dead the head of a family of diamond merchants that he and his partner tried to rob. Although he always denied any involvement and passed a polygraph, Bouhouche became the subject of enduring suspicions about what he might have been able to reveal about mass shootings by the still unidentified Brabant killers.

Life and criminal activities Madani "Dany" Bouhouche was born in Brussels, son of an Algerian father and Belgian mother. His views have been described as neo-Nazi despite his parentage. He started his police career with the Bijzondere Opsporings Brigade (BOB), a detective branch of the Rijkswacht/Gendarmerie in a fragmented law enforcement system that Belgium then had. Soon after joining the BOB, Bouhouche developed illegal activities with a few gendarmes of the BOB and others, most of whom ended up dismissed, imprisoned, fugitive or murdered after being inveigled into helping him. In 1981 he was caught trying to electronically surveil another unit and reassigned to regular duty, the same year he committed burglary of Group Diane in Etterbeek, stealing firearms including machine guns. Also in 1981 the superior officer who insisted on the disciplining of Bouhouche was almost killed in a machine gun attack that happened within days of another investigator suspicious of Bouhouche being the target of a car bomb.

Vague circumstantial links abound between Bouhouche's gang and the Brabant killers, they included the taking of risks to steal firearms rather than money; firearms stolen, used or seen carried in the killings being types he was known to have either bought (MAC10) or stolen (heavy buckshot riot guns, MP5 submachine guns), and those very same type weapons being found neither in the Brabant killer gangs' river dump of their guns nor in Bouhouche's secret arms cache of guns stolen from Group Diane. Moreover, the method of anonymising firearms and manufacturing false car number plates were reportedly identical; the areas chosen for clandestine disposal sometimes overlapped, both stored stolen cars for long periods, etc.