Five suspects have been arrested for the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Belgium who committed suicide after a video of her rape was posted.
Five people have been arrested and brought to justice in Belgium following the suicide of a 14-year-old girl, which may be linked to her rape and posting videos on social networking sites, Belgian media reported today.
The Ghent prosecutor’s office in Flanders has confirmed that five young people have been arrested, three of whom are minors. All of them are considered suspects for “events that happened shortly before the death of the victim”. Authorities, however, declined to comment on media reports that a preliminary investigation was under way into “rape”, “insulting public decency” and “taking and transmitting images capable of harming integrity”.
The two adults were sentenced to pre-trial detention while the three minors were “placed in special structures”, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office added. “Hateful, there are no words to describe it,” Justice Minister Vincent van Quikernborn reacted via Twitter. The minister promised that all those responsible would be punished and called on all victims of sexual violence to file complaints and seek help from experts.
The events go back to mid-May.
According to Flemish media, the 14-year-old ended her life four days after her gang rape in a cemetery in Ghent. The perpetrators videotaped their act and the pictures were posted on the internet, which probably pushed the teenage girl to suicide, according to her father who spoke to the newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. “These images were the drop that overflowed the glass (…) her world collapsed,” he said.
It was these images that led the authorities to the perpetrators.
According to the first data of the investigation, the teenager, who lived in Gover, went to Ghent believing that she had a date with a friend. When she arrived at the appointment, however, at the cemetery, four other young people appeared and all together participated in her rape. Child Focus reports that there has been a recent increase in cybercrimes against minors, such as sexually explicit messages, posting pictures without their consent, blackmail and more. In 2020, possibly due to the first lockdown imposed when the pandemic broke out, the number of these cases investigated by the authorities increased by 65% compared to 2019.
