It was around 6 am last Thursday that Sourour A. died at the central police station of the federal police located rue Royale in Brussels. This mother of a 19-year-old son, Belgian of Tunisian origin, and who worked in the voluntary sector, had been arrested a few hours earlier when she was intoxicated in the Châtelain district.
Placed in a sobering-up cell
The exact reasons for Sourour A.’s arrest have yet to be clarified. CCTV footage from the street where she was arrested has yet to be captured and should shed some light on this.
Still, the police took her on board and decided to place her in a drunk tank. It was around 7 a.m. that they discovered the lifeless body of Sourour A.
According to the elements given to the family, the victim would have committed suicide by choking with his sweater. This version is strongly contested by Selma Benkhelifa, the lawyer for the family of the deceased: “The family does not believe at all in the hypothesis of a suicide. They were told that she would have strangled herself with her sweater, which seems impossible”.
The images from the cameras of the cell, a key element of the investigation
Warned of the facts, the internal control of the police transmitted the information to the Committee P which opened a file. The police service monitoring body has already viewed the footage from the cell where the victim died.
They should in principle be sent to the Brussels public prosecutor’s office, which has started a judicial investigation, explains one of its spokespersons: “Investigative duties were ordered, a medical examiner descended on the scene and an autopsy was carried out. But according to the first elements it would be a suicide”.
According to our information, the results of the autopsy should be released on Monday. But it is above all the images from the surveillance cameras of the cell where Sourour A. died which is likely to be central in this case, insists Selma Benkhelifa: “The police station cell is indeed equipped with cameras. They have been seized and will show what really happened. It is hoped that there will be no malfunction or other technical problem which will prevent their viewing”.
Third suspicious death in two years
This is not the first time that someone has died in this police station whose cells are under the responsibility of the Brussels capital Ixelles police zone.
In 2021, two Algerians in their twenties lost their lives there in circumstances that are now the subject of a judicial investigation. For one of them, it appears from the elements of the file that it had taken nearly 9 hours for the police to intervene after the death. When contacted, officials in the area made no comment on this new suspicious death.
My sister was not a suicidal person
“My sister was not a suicidal person”, tells us the sister of Sourour A. “She had a 19-year-old son who she lived with and who was everything to her. She would never have abandoned him”.
The family was able to go to collect today at the INCC, the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology, where the body of the victim is.
“We want all the light to be shed on the circumstances of Sourour’s death. We want to know why there was no surveillance of our sister when she was in the cell. We will go all the way”, indicates the family.