D13 Squat Raid

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday December 18, 2001 21:25 by Amanda Moloney amanda_moloney at hotmail dot com

On Thursday morning the belgian police raided a squat and arrested and deported over thirty people. Squatting is legal in Brussels and police are supposed to give 30 days eviction notice to squatters.

The squat was raided at about 5.30am. I was with a group who escscaped over one of the back walls.
The police came outside. I saw 3 Police cars but there were also a number of plain clotes police in plain cars. it was impossible to tell how many. From an upstairs window we could see them give chase to anyone who tried to leave by the front.
At the back wall people were trying to climb over the wall to try and find a different way out. Some of us found a ladder and got up on the roof of another building. As we walked on the roof it gave way beneath me and i fell into the building. luckily i landed first on the bonnet of a car which broke my fall and then i bounced off that a couple of times and landed on the ground. I hurt my right shoulder pretty badly and my leg and arm and ribs.
2 guys followed me into what turned out to be a garage and then the alarms went off. The noise from this was heard in the squat and caused more people to try escape. We tried to leave from the garage door but that didnt work so we took the stairs to the roof and climed into the garden, then into the next building from which we managed to get out of onto the street. The police were to the left of us but they didnt pay any attention so we managed to get away.
We wandered around the city for about an hour and then went to the station squat were we heard that between 30 to 40 people had been arrested when the police came in. Two Irish men were amoung the arrested. All of these people were deported as Belgian laws only allow people to be held for 12 hours with out charge. With the exception of one man from Slovakia, who was released on Friday night as the police could not find a way to send him home and the had already held him a day too long.