Brussels Terror Attack Victim Euthanised at 23 After Unbearable Psychological Suffering

A Flemish woman who was present at the Brussels National Airport in 2016 during a radical Islamic terror attack has been euthanised at the age of 23 due to psychological trauma and suffering.

Shanti De Corte was just 23 when she died earlier this year on May 7th after requesting to be euthanised following years of psychological trauma and suffering resulting from her experiences on March 22nd 2016, when Islamist terrorists detonated explosives at the Brussels National Airport.

The young Flemish woman, who was with 90 other classmates in the airport departures area that day heading for a graduation trip to Rome, was not physically injured by the explosion, despite being just several metres away, broadcaster RTBF reports.

A few weeks after the attacks, De Corte was hospitalised in a psychiatric facility in Antwerp and was treated with antidepressants. On Facebook, she claimed to have taken as many as 11 antidepressant pills per day and wrote: “With all the medication I take, I feel like a ghost who no longer feels anything. Maybe there were other solutions than drugs.”

“There are some students who react worse than others to traumatic events. And having had her twice in an interview, I can tell you that Shanti De Corte was one of those fragile students. For me it is clear, she already had serious psychological disorders before the attack. So I referred her to psychiatry,” a psychologist who worked at De Corte’s school told RTBF.

In the years that followed the terror attack, De Corta was again hospitalised in 2018, and in 2020 made an attempt to end her own life.

She had also made several requests for euthanasia but was denied until she approached an association that advocates for those wishing to end their own lives with the assistance of physicians.

In April of this year, De Corte again made a request for euthanasia, which was granted by two psychiatrists. She was killed the following month surrounded by her family.

De Corte is not the only terror attack survivor in recent years to be greatly psychologically affected by their experience. In 2019, Guillaume Valette, a survivor of the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris was recognised as the 131st victim of the attack after he ended his own life in 2017.

Valette, like De Corte, suffered from psychological trauma in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which deteriorated to the point that he hanged himself.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.