Antwerp Building Explosion: Four Moroccan Victims to be Repatriated for Burial

Four Moroccans lost their lives in this explosion that shook the Hoboken district of Antwerp last Thursday. They are Houda, a ten-year-old girl and her mother, Mina Marc, Mohamed Boukhrih, 44, and Mostafa Zitouni Mouhsin, 53. Their families wish them to be repatriated and buried in Morocco. Boukhrih’s body is expected to be repatriated on Tuesday to Nador for burial. As for the bodies of Mina and her daughter Houda, they will be repatriated to Fez and then transferred to Khemisset where they will be buried in the Tidas douar. Zitouni’s body, for its part, will be repatriated to Fez, his hometown, reports the local site Nadorcity.

Mohammed Ameur, the Moroccan ambassador to Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and Mounir Kitou, the Moroccan consul general in the city of Antwerp, are working to facilitate the administrative procedures related to the repatriation of the bodies to Morocco for the grieving families. On Saturday, a large funeral ceremony was held for the deceased at the Al Nasr Al Fath mosque in Antwerp, in the presence of Mayor Bart De Wever and the President of the European Council of Moroccan Ulema.

The explosion of rare violence also left five injured, two of them seriously. An investigation has been opened to determine the cause of this explosion. At the current stage, the investigators favor the trail of the explosion of a clandestine drug laboratory. King Philippe, as well as the mayor of Antwerp, Bart De Wever, and the governor of the province, Cathy Berx, went to the scene to show their proximity to the families.