Belgian prosecutors on Friday announced they were ending a 40-year investigation into an armed gang that terrorized the country in the 1980s and killed 28 people, including children, in a series of robberies and shooting sprees.
"Unfortunately we were unable to bring the truth to the surface," Federal Prosecutor Ann Fransen said at a press conference on Friday.
Several of the attacks targeted supermarkets, but while the gunmen used extreme violence against bystanders, the goods they stole were often trivial by comparison, such as coffee and wine. They also attacked gun shops and higher-value targets.
None of the attackers - known to the Belgian public as the Brabant Killers or the Nivelles Gang - were ever caught, and their motives remain the subject of speculation.
There are suspicions they were linked to the far-right and the country's now-abolished gendarmerie.
Lawyer Jean-Paul Macau, who was injured in one of the supermarket attacks, was cited by Belga news agency as saying: "It's very disappointing to have waited so long to hear this, when the case is still unsolved. It's unique in the annals of Belgian justice that we haven't been able to find out the truth!"
Macau said he hopes the case might one day be reopened, but admitted that he's pessimistic: "There wasn't enough diligence at the beginning. We didn't use all the resources we could have."
On New Year's Eve 1981, automatic weapons were stolen in a burglary of a gendarmerie compound in Etterbeek, Brussels. A string of increasingly violent armed robberies at grocery stores and gun shops followed in 1982.
Then in 1983 and 1985, there were waves of attacks on supermarkets, in which the gang opened fire on customers.
A cache of weapons weapons was later found in the possession of Madani Bouhouche, a serving gendarme at the time of the burglary at the Etterbeek compound.
Bouhouche was never proven to have been a member of the gang and denied any involvement. He was convicted of two other murders in 1995.
Bouhouche was released from prison on parole in 2000. He moved to the French Pyrenees, where he died in a bizarre tree-felling accident in 2005. He was cremated before Belgian authorities were able to examine him.
Another gendarme, Robert Beijer, who was also convicted separately of murder, was interviewed as part of the investigation into the Brabant Killers. But he too was never proven to have been involved with the gang and he has always denied any involvement.
