Lionel D., the terrorist hunter confesses

Lionel D. joined the special forces of the Belgian federal police in 2002. He was 27 years old. A tough guy, of those who succeed in a period of training so demanding that it even included the practice of ‘sailboard’, the simulated drowning used by the Americans against members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. A practice which is no longer used in police training but which was used when Lionel D. entered the field. Where are the limits of each agent, “their sense of self-sacrifice”.

His unit’s job was to intervene when law enforcement was too dangerous for normal agents. The cases of kidnappings, of riots in prisons or persecution armed thieves.

He everything counts in “Terrorist Hunter”, a work written with the help of journalist Annemie Bulté and which is all the more interesting as it recounts, for the first time in first person, the months of jihadist hunting, the months hardest of 2015 and 2016, when Belgium and France feared every day a new attack.

Lionel D. says that until then, when they intervened, they were often confronted with dangerous guys, “gangsters who were trying to run away, tough criminals”, but they were people who they weren’t ready to die, “That when they were cornered, when they saw that they were facing the special forces, they usually calmed down and surrendered.”

The Daesh jihadists (ISIS) in Brussels were something else.

An enemy ready to die

January 15, 2015. Around four in the afternoon in Verviers, a town in eastern Belgium, on the border with Germany. Lionel D. and his men are put on the trail of a terrorist cell thanks to information from the secret services. Account that they knew that it would not be a simple operation. They smashed the two downstairs windows and threw a sound grenade to disorientate the three terrorists inside. The answer is a flurry of assault rifle shots. The officers respond with their weapons.

The men inside belonged to the cell of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the manager and coordinator of the Paris attacks November 13 of the same year. Two of the terrorists are killed in the shooting, one is arrested. Lionel D. and his companions already understand that they are facing an enemy ready to die, not common criminals

. It changes your job. There is more fear, more awareness of danger. A colleague is seriously injured.

The book tells various episodes of the fight against terrorism in Belgium in recent years. Episodes that until now only knew the men who had participated. One of the most tense occurs on March 15, 2016 when, during a check, two police officers believe they have discovered Salah Abdeslam’s lair, the only terrorist who survived to the Paris attacks, the most wanted man in Europe at the time.

Worst mission

Rue Dries, Forest, one of the 19 districts or municipalities of Brussels. A bourgeois and working-class neighborhood.

Lionel D. says that this mission was the worst “because she was not prepared, we didn’t have it under control. When we arrived there was already an injured policeman. He was a hell Because Mohamed Belkaïd, a jihadist friend of Abdeslam, had several police officers shot for long minutes, who could barely protect themselves.

This intervention again fails in its main objective. Abdeslam was there but escaped.

A few days later, he falls into another intervention by Lionel D. and his companions.

“Abdeslam it was like a loaded trash can», Declares the agent. It had become a myth, “he had to be captured, we knew it, it was a relief for everyone, also for the prosecution, for the investigators”. It was the beginning of the end.

Brussels, special

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