Former Child Criminal "Little Mustapha" Shares Life Story from Belgian Prison

Valerian Dirken met "Little Mustapha" several times in prison. At the age of 8 in the 1980s and measuring 1.35 m, Mustapha Riffi has grown up. He is 42 years old, measures 1.89 m and is still in prison in Marche. The book "The Little Mustapha the Robber Kid" was published by the writer Valerian Dirken at the request of Mustapha Riffi, reports La Dernière Heure. A book based on the story of this child imprisoned at the age of 12 who "boasted of having been presented by the Nouveau Détective as ’the kid who scares the police’". "But the media were far from the mark. They attributed 80 delinquency acts to him when there were many more. We only knew the tip of the iceberg," says the writer.

From the theft of a cash register in the secretariat of a school in Schaerbeek and a safe containing the money for the ski trips, Little Mustapha quickly built up a bad reputation as a robber kid. The death of his father, who died the previous year on the highway at the wheel of a Ford Capri, an overwhelmed mother, a violent stepfather. His desire as a child to wear designer clothes, to have "nice shoes and a Walkman" or the humiliation of the punishments inflicted in this Catholic institution, he who is Muslim, are all facts that, according to him, would have led him to theft.

"I had no morals. The old people, I pushed them a little. One day, to make someone talk at whose place we had broken in with my gang, I grabbed his dog, I took out an Opinel and I cut off one of his ears in front of him. Bingo, the man talked," Mustapha confides to Valerian Dirken who meets him in the visiting room. He remembers a theft he had never talked about: "In a Brussels hotel, the client’s briefcase containing 33 million Belgian francs - more than 2 million euros in today’s value". "It took me ’more than a year’ to spend the money, partly with girls. ’I was 15 years old, I went to prostitutes, I had all the girls’," he claims.

The 21 years spent behind bars did not bring him any positive transformation. "In reality," Dirken believes, "he is very proud to have been the first child sent to prison at the age of 12. And to have been the one because of whom the Lebrun law was passed." Released from prison in April 2021, on parole, with 7 years suspended, he will commit eleven hold-ups in the Charleroi and Namur regions three months later. He finds an excuse: "When you put me in prison at the age of 12, how do you want me to become anything else?" In March, he was sentenced to an additional 8 years for the eleven hold-ups. A new trial will open in the fall for four armed robberies (disputed) in Brussels.