Accounts of police station ‘orgy’ under investigation

PARIS— In the six weeks since the Paris terrorist attacks, law enforcement agencies in Brussels, where most of the attackers lived or had ties, have been denounced as slow, unresponsive, disorganized and even incompetent.

To this list of woes, another was added on Wednesday: Officials are investigating accounts of an alcoholfuelled “orgy” at a police station one night last month while Brussels, the Belgian capital, was nearly shut down over fears of a copycat terrorist attack.

A spokeswoman for the Brussels-West police agency, one of six police departments that patrol the city, confirmed on Wednesday that it had begun an internal investigation after an article was published Tuesday in La Dernière Heure, a local newspaper.

The police agency is responsible for Molenbeek, the working-class neighbourhood in Brussels that was home to several of the men involved in the Paris attacks, in which130 people were killed.

According to La Dernière Heure, the orgy occurred sometime between Nov. 21, when the federal government’s crisis centre raised the alert level for the Brussels region to 4, the highest, and Nov. 26, when the alert level was reduced to 3.

Soldiers had been sent to Brussels to help patrol the city, which was paralyzed with fear; schools, government offices, markets and the public transit network were all shut down.

About 20 soldiers from an infantry unit known as the Ardennes Battalion of Hunters were bivouacked at a police station in Ganshoren, a neighbourhood north of Molenbeek. According to the newspaper, after the police station closed for the night at 10 p.m., two policewomen were invited upstairs to the floor where the soldiers slept and had sex with eight of them.