The Flixbus inter-city bus company plans to cancel its service to a station in Brussels North, citing frequent attacks on passengers and threats to drivers.
Drivers say gangs lie in wait for their buses nearby to the station in the Belgian capital, which also serves as the European Union’s major administrative centre.
Once they pull in, the criminals pounce, stealing luggage and robbing passengers at knifepoint, while threatening drivers who dare to intervene.
“The emergency number on the bus is often not answered,” one exasperated driver told HLN.
“We are fed up and demand security.”
“Brussels North is not the safest neighbourhood,” confessed Audrey Dereymaeker, from the Brussels North police zone.
“The Maximilian Park, where many migrants come together, is close by. In the evenings they often hang around near the station,” he pointed out.
Breitbart London has previously reported how hundreds of illegal migrants hoping to infiltrate the United Kingdom have transformed the park into a smaller version of the crime-ridden ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, assisted by NGOs.
Despite acknowledging the problem, however, Dereymaeker said police could not always align their patrols with the bus’s arrival and departure times, “because we also have other tasks”.
He even suggested the bus company to hire its own security agents — suggesting the authorities have effectively accepted their inability to maintain law and order in the capital in the wake of the migrant crisis.
This at least partial loss of control over parts of the city is not a new phenomenon, however, with the armed forces and security services putting it under extended periods of virtual lockdown in both 2015 and 2016 to try and contain terror threats emanating from the district of Molenbeek — a so-called no-go zone which has been described as Europe’s jihad capital.
Nor is Brussels the only European capital where Flixbus bus drivers and their passengers have come under threat.
In Paris, a raid on one of the company’s buses by a mob of what have been claimed to be migration-background men who opened up its baggage compartment while it was still in motion and stole the luggage went viral after a bystander recorded the attack and uploaded it to social media.