Between 1982 and 1985, an unidentified gang murdered 28 people and injured 22 in a series of violent raids across Belgium, often for tiny hauls of cash and pantry staples. Known as the Brabant Killers or the Gang of Nivelles, they combined paramilitary tactics with seemingly amateur mistakes, and the case remains unsolved. This episode unpacks the contradictions, the theories, and the institutional collapse that followed.

We set the scene in Cold War Belgium and the heavily armed Gendarmerie whose tactics, ammunition, and stolen weapons kept surfacing in the case. We trace the crimes from a barracks burglary to the 1985 Aalst supermarket attack where the Van de Steen family was executed in the parking lot, and we examine the underworld theory around ex-gendarme Madani Bouhouche alongside the strategy-of-tension theory linking the attacks to ...