Federal Police Special Units
the former name of the Belgian police's counter-terrorism unit
The Directorate of special units (DSU) (Dutch: Directie van de speciale eenheden; French: Direction des unités spéciales; German: Direktion der Sondereinheiten) is the police tactical unit of the Belgian Federal Police. In total, DSU consists of about 500 highly trained police officers. The centralized 50 operator small assault team of the intervention unit of the DSU is deployed in cases of terrorism, kidnappings, hostage taking and other forms of serious crime. DSU performs emergency responses, high-risk arrests and searches, observation operations, undercover operations and more.
Chief commissioner Eric Liévin, one of the DSU's former commanders, states that "a criminal dealing with the DSU, has a better chance of surviving than another; they try to use a minimal level of violence/force, and yet try to attain a maximum level of efficiency."
History
The original DSU was created within the former Rijkswacht/Gendarmerie in 1972 in the aftermath of the Munich massacre and was called Group Diane.
In 1974 the name was changed from Diane to SIE (also outside Belgium, Dutch: Speciaal Interventie Eskadron) or ESI (French: Escadron spécial d'intervention, also known as Groupe interforces antiterroriste).
In the 1980s, the unit operated against pro-leftist groups.
In 2001, all Belgian police forces (municipal, judicial and Rijkswacht/Gendarmerie) were reformed into the integrated police structured on two levels, the local police and the federal police. The SIE/ESI took the form of the Directorate of special units (DSU), which was part of the newly created federal police. In 2007 the DSU was integrated into the Office of the General Commissioner (CG) and its name was changed to CGSU. Due to an optimization reform within the federal police that started in 2014, the special units were moved from the Office of the General Commissioner to the General directorate of the judicial police (DGJ), one of the three general directorates resorting under the Office of the General Commissioner.
“Federal Police Special Units” enters the record as the former name of the Belgian police's counter-terrorism unit. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Federal, Police and Special can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1823470. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1974, 2001 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Federal Police Special Units” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.