This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A prisoner on day release who shot dead two police officers and a bystander in Liège on Tuesday in a suspected terrorist attack had killed another person the previous evening.

Belgium’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, revealed that Benjamin Herman, 31, “committed a murder the night before” he went on his shooting spree in the Belgian city.

The victim was a former prisoner and convicted drug dealer, Michael Wilmet, 30, who was found with injuries consistent with being attacked by a blunt instrument to the head.

Herman was killed in a shootout with police on Tuesday after stabbing two female police officers as they checked parking meters and then shooting them dead with one of their service revolvers.

He also shot dead Cyriel Vangriecken, 22, a student at the University of Liège, who was in the passenger seat of his mother’s Ford Fiesta which was stopped at a red light close to the site where the officers had been killed.

Herman subsequently took a cleaner at a school hostage, before being shot himself as he tried to flee the building.

Wenke Roggen, a federal magistrate, said on that the attack was considered “terrorist murder and attempted terrorist murder”.

Late on Wednesday, the Islamic State’s propaganda agency claimed that Herman was a “soldier of the caliphate” although it offered no evidence to show that the attacker was affiliated with the terror group.

Witnesses said the attacker in Liège was dressed in black and carrying a rucksack. Footage aired by the broadcaster RTBF showed him shouting “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest, in Arabic – as he walked through the city. Roggen confirmed that Herman shouted the phrase several times during the shootings.



The school cleaning lady taken hostage by Herman later told Belgian media that she was released after confirming to him that she was a Muslim. When she asked him to spare the children in the school, Herman told her that she should worry about “our Syrian brothers”, she said.

Herman had been in and out of prison for drugs, robbery and assault convictions since 2003. He had absconded before when given short periods of leave from jail, a common method to rehabilitate long-term prisoners in Belgium.

Soraya Belkacemi (left) and Lucile Garcia were shot dead in the attack in Liège. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Speaking to Belgian media on Wednesday, Herman’s father said his son had acted normally in the hours before the murders. “On Monday I went to get him in prison,” he said. “After I picked him up, I led him to a session with a psychiatrist in Namur. He [then] spent time here in the garden with the children, he played with them and he even went for ice creams.”

Fabienne Marechal, the mother of the 22-year-old student killed, told reporters her son was shot repeatedly.

She said: “At the level of the Lycée Leonie De Waha, my son suddenly said: ‘Mama, there is something going on. There is a policeman on the footpath.’ The situation felt very strange, I wanted to accelerate immediately to drive away.

“We still did not see what was going on. Suddenly the shooter came to our car. He was shouting, but I did not understand it. Without hesitation, he then shot my son with several bullets. Just killed him through the window on the passenger side. I do not understand. That man. I still see him walking towards us. He shot. And shot. My child was killed before my eyes and I could not even protect him.”

Koen Geens, the Belgian justice minister, said he was “examining his conscience” over Herman’s release.

He said: “I feel primarily responsible because I have responsibility for prisons. Should this man have been released on prison leave? This is a difficult question and it deserves an examination of my conscience.

“For normal prison leave like this one, I would not want to reopen the debate because it’s really going to make people desperate in jail.”

Members of the federal and local police held a minute’s silence at 1pm on Wednesday at the Brussels courthouse.