Case traces cannabis, cocaine and MDMA sales run through two shopping galleries in Ixelles back to a leader already serving 22 years for manslaughter
A major trial opened in Brussels this week involving 46 defendants accused of running a drug-dealing operation out of two shopping galleries in the city’s Matonge neighbourhood, a case prosecutors say generated more than €6 million over roughly three and a half years of activity. Proceedings began on 15 September 2026 at the Justitia building in Brussels, a courthouse complex located in former NATO buildings, following an investigation that stretched from routine street-level police checks into one of the most extensive drug prosecutions the district has seen in years.
According to the Brussels prosecutor’s office, the network sold cannabis, cocaine and MDMA/ecstasy out of the Galerie Matonge and the neighbouring Galerie Vendôme, two covered shopping arcades in the Matongewijk area of the Elsene/Ixelles municipality. Matonge is one of Brussels’ best-known neighbourhoods, closely associated with the city’s Congolese and wider Central African diaspora, and has for years also had a reputation, as the Brussels prosecutor’s office put it in comments on the case, for drug dealing that causes nuisance to local residents. The trial is intended to draw a line under a specific, well-documented chapter of that problem rather than address the phenomenon in the neighbourhood as a whole.
Investigators say the operation ran from March 2022 until the network was dismantled in a series of raids on 3 November 2025, when police carried out searches at 25 locations across the country simultaneously. The case did not begin as a single, targeted organised-crime investigation. Instead, prosecutors say it grew out of more than 120 individual police checks and smaller-scale interventions in and around the Matonge galleries, incidents that were gradually connected and consolidated into what became a formal criminal investigation into an organised network rather than a series of unrelated street-dealing cases.
The 46 people now standing trial are alleged to have played a range of roles within the organisation. Court documents described by VRT NWS indicate that some defendants managed storage points where drugs were kept before sale, others were responsible for supplying product to street-level sellers, and still others kept financial records for the operation, suggesting a structured division of labour typical of larger organised drug-trafficking networks rather than a loose collection of independent dealers. Prosecutors put the total turnover generated by the network during the period under investigation at more than €6 million.
At the centre of the case is a 35-year-old man from the Brussels municipality of Etterbeek, identified in reporting by his initials, M.B., whom prosecutors describe as the leader of the organisation. He is not a first-time defendant before the Brussels courts: in 2024, he was convicted separately and sentenced to 22 years in prison for manslaughter (doodslag). That he is now facing trial as the alleged head of a multi-million-euro drug network, while already serving a lengthy sentence for a violent offence, has added to the scale and visibility of the current proceedings.
The trial itself, given the number of defendants, is expected to run over an extended series of hearing days at the Justitia complex, which was purpose-repurposed to handle large multi-defendant organised-crime cases of exactly this kind. Brussels’ prosecution service has in recent years increasingly relied on this venue for exactly such large-scale drug and organised-crime trials, reflecting both the volume of defendants and the complexity of evidence — including financial records, surveillance material and testimony gathered over more than three years of investigation — that needs to be presented to the court.
The case is also notable for what it says about how large-scale drug distribution networks can operate for years out of highly visible, everyday commercial premises in the heart of a major European capital. The Galerie Matonge and Galerie Vendôme are ordinary shopping arcades, lined with shops, hair salons, restaurants and other small businesses serving the local community; prosecutors allege that within that same commercial fabric, an organised network was simultaneously running a storage, supply and sales operation worth millions of euros, largely unnoticed until the accumulation of individual police checks over months turned into a full criminal investigation.
For residents of Matonge, the case is likely to be read as vindication of long-standing complaints about drug dealing and its effects on daily life in the neighbourhood, even as the trial itself focuses narrowly on the criminal responsibility of the 46 individual defendants rather than on the broader question of drug-related nuisance in the area. The Brussels prosecutor’s office has indicated that it regards the case as a significant test of its ability to build organised-crime prosecutions out of accumulated street-level policing data, a model that could inform how similar networks are investigated and prosecuted elsewhere in the city in the future.
As the trial continues, further hearings are expected to examine individual defendants’ specific roles within the network, the extent of the financial records seized during the November 2025 raids, and any additional charges connected to money laundering of the proceeds generated by the operation. No verdict has yet been reached, and the scale of the case — nearly 50 defendants — means proceedings are expected to continue for a considerable period.
