Sanda Dia’s deadly hazing: five hundred people on the streets in Brussels to denounce the verdict

About five hundred people demonstrated on Sunday June 4 in Brussels in memory of Sanda Dia, a mixed-race student who died following a hazing in 2018, denouncing the lenient judgment from which in their eyes the members of the student circle originally benefited. drama. “Justice for Sanda”, “silence kills”proclaimed the signs held up by the demonstrators, mostly students and families, according to a photographer from Agence France-presse.

One of the organizers of the rally, Jean Kitenge, denounced “class justice”. “Would the sentence have been the same if the perpetrators had been like me, black or North African? »he asked, also calling for “to better frame student folklore”. This Belgian-Congolese student, saying he was personally affected by the case, recalled that Sanda Dia, an Antwerp resident born to a Mauritanian father, was not from the same social background or the same skin color as the organizers of the hazing. , from the Reuzegom circle. Sons of “the elite” Flemish, according to him.

The rally was symbolically organized in front of the Brussels courthouse, nine days after the judicial epilogue, in Antwerp (North), of this file which had a big impact, particularly in Dutch-speaking Belgium.

Sodium overdose

In December 2018, Sanda Dia, who was then beginning her engineering studies at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain (KU Leuven), had suffered a three-day hazing with two comrades. He had to swallow a phenomenal quantity of alcohol, without being able to hydrate himself to lower his blood alcohol level, then stay in an icy hole of water from which he emerged in hypothermia. The “hazed”, 20 years old, had also been forced to drink a very salty mixture based on fish oil. A sodium overdose caused cerebral edema which he did not survive. He died in hospital two days after being admitted to intensive care.

Eighteen of his fellow students, members of the Reuzegom fraternity, were sent to trial to answer in particular for “manslaughter”, “degrading treatment” and “non-assistance to a person in danger”. On May 26, the Antwerp Court of Appeal sentenced the eighteen students to community service lasting between two hundred and three hundred hours, and fined 400 euros each. At the hearing in March, the prosecution had demanded sentences ranging from eighteen to fifty months in prison.

In the press, Ousmane Dia, the father of the victim, denounced a decision “disrespectful”and reproached the KU Leuven for not having sought ” the truth “ by renouncing to file a civil action.

Read the letter from our correspondent in Brussels: Article reserved for our subscribers In Belgium, the leniency of justice after a fatal hazing arouses bitterness

The World with AFP