SEPTEMBER 2001

...former Belgian police officer describes how he and his brother disposed of Lumumba’s body. Story by Osei Boateng

Years after cutting up the bodies of Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito into pieces and ?making them disappear? in sulphuric acid, the Belgian police commissioner, Gerard Soete, wrote a book about it, titled ?The Arena: The Story of Lumumba’s Assassination.

Though he did not name himself and his brother, Michel, in the book as ?the two Europeans? who did what he himself called the ?diabolical job?, Soete nonetheless described in graphic detail the frame of mind of ?the two Europeans? as they sawed up the bodies of Lumumba and his companions.

Soete died suddenly in the middle of last year after the Belgian parliamentary inquiry into Lumumba’s murder had started its work.

But before he died, he had appeared in a documentary on Lumumba’s death shown on the Belgian TV channel, VRT-Canvas, on 21 and 28 October 1999. He had also given an interview to the publication, Humo, published on 5 October 1999. On both occasions, Soete confessed that ?the two Europeans? who had hacked Lumumba’s body into pieces were indeed himself and his brother, Michel.

In his own book, The Arena, Soete described the ?diabolical job? in a chapter headed: ?To the Depths of Hell?. He wrote:


?Twenty metres from the road, at the place of execution in the middle of wooded savannah, the stiff hand of the Prophet [Lumumba] rises towards the sky: a last attempt to accuse, to call upon his destructive troops. They still can’t kill decently. They do not think of the corpse that remains after the destruction of the human being.

As soon as they put the bodies near the empty barrels and assemble their equipment, they realise that they are not prepared for that kind of job. They go back to the car and drink whisky...

Unused to this task, they start by hacking the bodies to pieces like maniacs. This gets them nowhere, except into stink and filth, and they decide to tie towels round their mouths.

Schafer [Soete’s norm de guerre] grabs the hacksaw and the Prophet’s leg and starts sawing just above the knee, as if it were the branch of a tree. He delicately places the piece of the leg at the bottom of the barrel and continues separating the limbs from the torso one by one...

When he is left with only the torso and the head, he suddenly realises the horror of what he is doing. Denys keeps as still as a stone statue, holding a torch to light the scene. It is Schafer who awakens his hatred. Passion mixes with his drunkenness. His fingers grab the metallic fuzzy hair firmly, this is the decisive gesture...

He puts the saw aside. It is no match for this monstrous head. He takes the axe, puts his foot on the jaw and splits the neck; he is out of breath; he swears profusely, cursing everybody like the brothers of his race...

?I’m doing this instead of you, you white cowards.’ It is a grating oath spat out between clenched teeth through the cotton wool of the sanitary towel...

Suddenly, gripped by an immense repugnance, he curses all the nationalist prophets with goatees and big glasses, all his own country’s fops with silk hats and false promises.

With the ferocity of hatred, he delivers the axe blow that separates the last vertebrae from the neck, takes the stinking head in his hands and spits on it. Then, his head resting on his crossed arms, he sits in the liquid soiling the grass, and begins to sob. Beside him, the limbless torso. At his feet is the head, an impossible object...

Here is the only material proof of the Prophet’s death. If a cult of martyrdom ever appeared, he could provide it with relics. He takes some pincers out of the tool bag, and extricates with difficulty two gold teeth from the Prophet’s upper jaw. Dentists can identify unrecognisable corpses by the prosthesis.

He takes the right arm out of the barrel and cuts two fingers from the stiff hand: the index finger has a bullet hole where the hand tried to protect the body, the index finger which had issued so many threats, which had shown the excited masses the way to destruction, to death and to his own end; and the little finger with the long nail which he used to clean his nose and ears while in prison.

He envelops the relics in a clean cloth, bends over to where a bullet has fallen out of the corpse onto the ground, adds it to the evidence and puts it all in his pocket.

He picks up the torso, puts it in the barrel on top of the limbs and lays the head over it. He opens one of the demijohns and pours the contents on the dismembered body. A column of gas, white and whistling, rises to the sky. The acid turns the Prophet into a mass of mucous.?


Ludo de Witte, in the recently published English translation of his book, The Assassination of Lumumba (full review next month), reveals that Alexandre Belina, Tshombe’s lawyer, later told Jacques Brassine that the Soete brothers went on leave for two weeks in South Africa to recover from the ordeal.

?Gerard Soete went on to have a very good career under Mobutu?, adds De Witte. In 1999, Soete had told the producers of the VRT-Canvas documentary: ?I am still haunted by this nightmare.?

Ludo de Witte provides the final curtain call:

?The operation took hours and only ended the next morning, on 23 January [1961],? he writes. ?At first the two Belgians wore masks over their mouths but took them off when they became uncomfortable. Their only protection against the stench was whisky, so according to Brassine, they got drunk.

?One of the [Congolese] assistants spilt acid on his foot and burned it badly. They discovered that they did not have enough acid and only burned part of the bodies.

?According to [police commissioner Frans] Verscheure, the skulls were ground up, and the bones and teeth (that neither acid nor fire can destroy) were scattered on the way back.

?The same occurred with the ashes. Nothing was left of the three nationalist leaders; nowhere could their remains, even the most minute trace of them, be found.?

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