While the circumstances of the tragedy are controversial in Belgium, the Saint-Luc University Clinics, in a press release sent to AFP on Saturday, wished to “recall that any patient who presents to the emergency room is free to leave them on his own initiative except if it was part of ongoing police surveillance, which was not the case in the context of this admission”.
“No instructions have been given by the competent authorities,” added the establishment.
The suspect, Yassine M., a 32-year-old Belgian, a former radicalized detainee on file with the anti-terrorist services, attacked two police officers in Brussels on Thursday evening with a knife, fatally injuring one of them.
He had presented himself in the morning at a police station in the Belgian capital asking to be “psychologically taken care of”, according to the Brussels public prosecutor’s office, and had, after the advice of a magistrate, been accompanied to the hospital. Saint Luke.
Wounded by police fire in response to the attack on Thursday evening, the suspect was still hospitalized on Saturday. He has been placed “under an arrest warrant for murder and attempted murder in a terrorist context”, but has not yet been able to be heard, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office told AFP.
The hospital where he had been taken before the events indicated that the man had presented himself to the emergency department around 11:00 a.m. Thursday, accompanied by three police officers, “for voluntary psychological care”.
After “28 minutes”, he was seen by a nurse, according to the establishment, which specifies that the police officers left the emergency department “at that time without ever having informed the members of the emergency staff of the dangerousness of the person”.
The man was then placed “in the waiting room to wait before his psychiatric treatment”, but “about twenty minutes later”, the nurse coming to pick him up found that he “had left the room. ‘waiting of his own free will’. “The psychiatric evaluation could therefore not take place,” said the hospital.
The attack, during which another policeman was injured, sparked questions and protests even within the government coalition led by Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
It has also angered police unions, who have called for the resignation of Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne and are planning a protest in Brussels on November 28.
