MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st June, 2021) Belgian Justice Minister Vincent van Quickenborne on Monday urged people to embrace facts and shun conspiracy theories about the death of Jürgen Conings, a heavily armed fugitive soldier whose corpse was discovered over the weekend, four weeks after he went missing after threatening to kill a renowned virologist.
According to media reports, Conings, who is believed to have shot himself, was discovered by Johan Tollenaere, the mayor of Maaseik � a municipality in the Belgian province of Limburg � on Sunday morning, just a short distance from an area recently combed by soldiers.
Although Conings' aunt ruled out suicide, alleging that security forces had killed her nephew, Van Quickenborne said that an investigation would be launched into the failure of the search parties to find Conings, and reiterated the possibility of suicide.
"I also notice that there are conspiracy theories going around ... You have to define the search area somewhere. You can't take the whole of Belgium as your search area," Van Quickenborne said as quoted by The Guardian. "The fact that he was found only a few hundred meters away shows that they were in the right place. Don't forget that this is a forest the size of 24,000 football fields, densely overgrown. The search also had to be done with caution. But as time went on, the suicide hypothesis was increasingly taken into account. After all, he had disappeared a month ago."
Conings, a specialist marksman, disappeared on May 17 after taking four anti-tank missile launchers, a submachine gun, and a bulletproof vest from his barracks.
Based on media reports, Conings posted letters to his wife and the police before his disappearance. He threatened to kill Marc Van Ranst, Belgium's renowned virologist who doubles as an advisor to the government on its strict COVID-19 restrictions. The deceased, connected with the extreme right in Flanders, was tagged as a "serious threat" to the state three months earlier.
