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RUSSIA-BELGIUM-BUSINESS-DEATH
Belgium probes engineer’s death in Russia
BRUSSELS, Sept 5, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Belgian investigators want to talk to
their Russian counterparts about the death of a steel executive in Moscow and
to interview his driver, who reportedly saw the fatal fall, officials said
Wednesday.
The federal prosecutor’s office said it has opened a routine investigation
into the death last week of Belgian research scientist Bruno Charles De
Cooman, who died in a fall from his high-rise apartment building.
Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for Belgian federal prosecutors, said there is
no reason at this point to doubt the approach of Russian officials, who are
reportedly working on the premise he committed suicide and are not treating
it as a criminal case.
“We opened an investigation because it was a violent death,” Van Der Sypt
told AFP.
“We will contact the Russian investigators. We have a cooperation agreement
with the prosecutors in Moscow,” he said.
“We’ll see what they see in their files,” he added. “We’re trying to gather
as much information as possible.
“The driver is Belgian. It seems logical to us that we talk to the driver
when he returns home.
But we have no idea when,” Van Der Sypt added.
Russian news media quoted the driver as saying he saw De Cooman falling
from the eighth-floor floor window of the building on Serafimovich Street on
the opposite side of the Moskva river from the Kremlin.
But De Cooman’s family voiced suspicion about the circumstances surrounding
his August 29 fall and his mother expressed doubt that he committed suicide.
– ‘I want to know the truth’ –
His mother Marie Madeline Meunier told Belgian broadcaster RTL that her son
left work unusually around noon and asked his driver to wait for him below
the entrance to the building, saying he would not take long.
Meunier said she is convinced people were waiting for her son upstairs.
“They knocked him out and threw him out the window,” she told VTM
television, a Flemish network. “I want to know the truth and it’s in the
hands of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” she said.
De Cooman, a former professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had
been vice president of research and development at the Russian group
Novolipetsk Steel (NLMK) since 2017.
“Bruno De Cooman’s death is an enormous loss for the Group and the entire
sector, for his friends and family,” said Grigory Fedorishin, NLMK Group
President.
“He has made an invaluable contribution to the development of global
steelmaking through product innovation.”
Meunier said Belgian investigators must interview the driver and obtain her
son’s phone to study his call log.
TASS news agency quoted a source as saying no traces of a struggle were
found during a preliminary search of the businessman’s flat.
Russia’s investigative committee declined to comment when an AFP journalist
phoned staff on Tuesday for more information in the case.
A source close to the case told TASS that Russian investigators were
working on the premise that De Cooman committed suicide.
However, several Russian media outlets said no suicide note was found.
NLMK is owned by Vladimir Lisin who Forbes lists as one of Russia’s
wealthiest oligarchs. The group employs about 2,500 people in Europe, with
about 1,000 in Belgium.
BSS/AFP/IJ/1606 hrs