2006 Antwerp shooting
mass shooting
On 11 May 2006, a shooting occurred in the city centre of Antwerp. The gunman, 18-year-old student Hans Van Themsche, killed two people and severely wounded another, before being shot and incapacitated by a police officer. Van Themsche (born 7 February 1988, in Wilrijk, Antwerp, Flemish Region of Belgium) was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008.
The homicide received widespread media attention and drew major public and political attention to responsibilities regarding political presentation of immigrant and racial issues and its possible effects on individuals.
Course of events
Van Themsche had been caught smoking at his boarding school on 9 May 2006, and was facing likely expulsion.
He travelled from Roeselare to Antwerp where, on the morning of the eleventh, he had his long hair cut and shaven off (apart from a ponytail) before legally purchasing a Marlin 336W hunting rifle in .30-30 Winchester and ammunition from a local weapons merchant. About ten minutes before noon, dressed in a Gothic fashion, he began his rampage in the city centre with a shot in the breast of a woman of Turkish descent who was seated six metres away on a bench reading a book; Songul Koç was severely wounded. He chambered another round and passed a pregnant Malian nanny, Oulemata Niangadou, and her two-year-old European charge, Luna Drowart. He turned and shot each of them in the back at close range, killing both instantly. While he moved on (presumably looking for more victims) Van Themsche was intercepted by a passing police officer, who held him at gunpoint and ordered him to surrender the rifle.
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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 Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131481425. Authority coordinates are 51.223, 4.404. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 1988 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “2006 Antwerp shooting” 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.