The Belgian police have been able to pick up four suspects, thanks to an alert hotel boss.
The Belgian police confirmed the four arrests. The two Dutch women, aged 21 and 22 years old, according to the Gazet van Antwerpen are from Leiden.
They had left for a weekend in Antwerp, Belgium, where they visited Roxy discotheque in the evening to watch Dutch DJs perform in the entertainment area.
The women got talking to five men there, writes Het Nieuwsblad. “We remember that we were in the nightclub”, they told the police. “Then there is one black hole.”
According to the organizers, there were no problems on Friday. “Nobody came to warn our security. Otherwise we would certainly have intervened.”
Presumably the women in the club were anesthetized with a drug such as Rohypnol. One of the men accompanied them to their hotel room in a boutique hotel in the center of the city. Probably the African then let in his companions.
Four suspects have been arrested: three from Antwerp and one from Temse, who according to Het Nieuwsblad are all in their twenties and of African descent. “One man was arrested on Saturday and was charged by the investigating judge on Sunday,” says Caroline Vanderstokker of the Antwerp police.
The three other suspects were later arrested. The four are suspected of rape and theft.
A spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service can not say anything about a fifth suspect in the interest of the investigation.
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The five men spent the whole night in the hotel room. At about 8:30 am, a receptionist from the hotel, to her great surprise, saw the five coming down and walking calmly towards the exit.
When the women woke up at around 10.30 am, they soon noticed that their money and phones had disappeared. The women made a confused impression to the hotel staff. The staff then told the women about the five men, and their memories slowly came back.
In the end it was the alert hotel boss who had the Africans arrested. At 7.15 pm one of the men came back to the hotel. He was looking for the women. “I immediately came to the hotel”, says the owner, who wants to remain anonymous. The hotel boss was able to hold the man, along with his “dangerous-looking dog” until the police arrived. “It was 17 long minutes, but I made him stay. Over my dead body.”
He added: “The stunned or drugged women must have – unintentionally – helped the rapists.”