On the evening of Thursday, 29 October, a prisoner at Leuven Central ran amok with a pair of scissors, stabbing a prison officer 12 times and wounding another member of staff and three prisoners. The man, Iran-born Hussein Mamiani, was joined by another prisoner who started attacking others with a stick. The two then shut themselves up in a cell while holding a fellow prisoner hostage. Mamiani was later shot dead by the special intervention unit of the federal police, and 22-year-old Jimmy Hemeleers was taken into custody.

The incident was triggered when Mamiani, who was serving 22 years for the attempted murder of a doctor, learned that he was to receive a disciplinary sanction for an earlier argument with a prison guard. Hemeleers’ participation in the incident appears to have been opportunistic.

Prison staff stopped work immediately after the incident, and union action soon spread to other prisons in Flanders, as well as to the youth detention centre in Everberg. While other prisons returned to work soon afterwards, staff at Leuven Central decided to carry on their action until Monday.

Justice minister Stefaan De Clerck visited the prison for talks with staff and blamed the problems on overcrowding. At present, there are 10,400 men in prison in Belgium, some 2,000 more than full capacity. But Leuven Central is not overcrowded. While De Clerck’s description of “more people and more pressure on staff that creates an atmosphere of anxiety” is true of many institutions, Leuven is in fact considered one of the easier prisons, where inmates are allowed to circulate freely and where there are many work and leisure activities organised. Overcrowding elsewhere, however, has created a dangerous situation, according to criminologist Brice De Ruyver of Ghent University, quoted in De Morgen. According to De Ruyver, some 1,000 inmates currently in ordinary prisons should be detained in psychiatric institutions but are not for lack of available places, creating what he called “a gigantic risk”. Mamiani, while identified as a sociopath, was not under an order to be committed to psychiatric detention.

This week, as Flanders Today went to press, staff at Leuven Central met to decide to continue their stoppage until 5 November at 10.00. Prison officer Sonja De Saedeleer, who was stabbed in the Leuven incident, remained in intensive care, but her condition was no longer said to be critical. Hemeleers, who is serving 30 years for a murder committed when he was 17, was transferred first to Hasselt and later to Bruges.

Meanwhile, staff at Ittre prison in Walloon Brabant, south of Brussels, voted by a large majority to strike until 11 November, the longest stoppage in the prison’s history. In Ittre, where the cells are full but not overcrowded, there have been four hostage-taking incidents in the past year, union leaders said.

According to unions, there is on average one violent incident in a Belgian prison every day, four times as many as in recent years. “Aggression is not only expressed towards prison officers; the atmosphere among detainees is becoming more hostile,” one representative said. The causes, according to the unions, include overcrowding, an increase in the number of prisoners from the former East bloc, the growth of gangs in prisons and the removal from the system of model prisoners, who now come under electronic surveillance and who no longer exercise a moderating influence among the prison population.