Antwerp restaurant owners attacked after well-known YouTuber wrongly links their son to fatal initiation | Abroad

The couple’s lawyer, Wim De Colvenaer, has since taken legal action. “My clients have worked hard for their restaurant for 25 years and always received positive reviews, until last week. After the ruling in the Reuzegom case, an anonymous Instagram account suddenly called for a boycott of the restaurant. Their son and their catering business were also mentioned in a video by youtuber Acid, resulting in a massive amount of negative reviews and false reservations, which forced them to switch off the online reservation system.”

The lawyer filed a complaint against the anonymous Instagram account and also sent a notice of default to Acid, a youtuber known in Belgium and friend of Enzo Knol, on Wednesday evening. YouTube has since taken his video offline and temporarily suspended his account. “We’re going to expose people!” Acid said in the video in question. He aimed his arrows at the suspects in the Sanda Dia case, who died in 2018 in a hazing that got out of hand. Eighteen defendants, all members of Reuzegom, were found guilty last week and sentenced to community service of up to 300 hours and a fine of 400 euros. Too low a sentence, Acid thought.

Lawyer De Colvenaer is looking into whether something criminal can be done against Acid. “The pendulum has completely swung. My clients receive anonymous calls calling their son a murderer. They get the biggest sludge over them, while they have nothing to do with the Giant Gum case. This just has to stop. Those people are completely in sackcloth and ashes and are even considering temporarily closing their business.”

Sammy Mahdi, chairman of the Belgian political party CD&V, responded on Thursday night to the news that Acid had announced the names of a number of Reuzegommers, even though not all of them had anything to do with the Sanda Dia case. He casually criticized ‘journalism’ because the media would not consistently apply the rules of anonymity. “You should explain to me for once how it is that a witch hunt is organized on Acid, while he does nothing else than what journalism does every day,” says Mahdi.

Pol Deltour of the Flemish Association of Journalists regrets that CD&V chairman Sammy Mahdi is ‘dragging the media into the bath’. According to Deltour, Mahdi “gives the impression that the media, together with the judiciary, are part of some kind of class plot to protect the people of Reuzegom.” “It is quite correct what the media have done in this case. The coverage was very extensive, you cannot say that the press is in a conspiracy to cover up the matter. A lot of attention has also been paid to the judgment itself.”

Deltour says the criticism that the media is not always consistent is ‘somehow understandable’. But the fact that the convicts in the Sanda Dia case are not mentioned by name is not exceptional, he says. ,,Moreover, all ‘mainstream media’ have made the choice here separately not to mention names. That shows that this has been thought through.”

According to Deltour, the fact that the judges have pronounced ‘fairly mild sentences’, that these are young people who deserve a second chance and that they are not public figures are matters that have been taken into consideration by the media. “This was a very reasonable choice here.”

Last week, the judge imposed community service orders and fines on eighteen students for their involvement in the fatal hazing incident five years ago. The members of student association Reuzegom subjected the then 20-year-old Sanda Dia to all kinds of humiliations and hardships for thirty hours. He eventually died hypothermic and poisoned.

Aspiring engineer Dia wanted to join their Leuven student fraternity Reuzegom five years ago and had to do all kinds of degrading things to do so. The newcomers had to sit in a self-dug well in the December cold and drink liters of salty fish sauce while buckets of ice-cold water were thrown over them. Dia became unconscious, was taken out of the well after an hour with severe hypothermia and with salt poisoning and was taken to hospital a few hours later. There he died of organ failure two days later.

Prison sentences had been demanded against the Reuzegommers, but the Antwerp court of appeal finds them not guilty of the most serious charges. For example, fish sauce is basically non-toxic and they have therefore not administered any harmful substances, as the Public Prosecution Service charged them. The court therefore sticks to community service and fines, including for wrongful death and ‘degrading treatment’. The chairman, the hazing leader or ‘shaft tamer’ and an exceptionally active hazing person receive the highest possible community service of 300 hours.

The fatal ‘student baptism’ aroused great indignation in Belgium. The Reuzegommers, mostly from wealthy circles, turned out to have erased all traces after Dia was taken to the hospital and to have erased messages about the events on their phones. Many hired expensive lawyers who, for example, sometimes protracted the lawsuit undesirably to the liking of Dia’s relatives.

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