Far-Right Idolising Anti-Lockdown Soldier Whose Body Was Found in Park After Manhunt

Belgian authorities have failed to stop hundreds of far-right supporters of Jurgen Conings from marching through the park where the weapons instructor’s body was found ten days ago. 

Conings, 46, has been idolised by far-right supporters and lockdown sceptics since he threatened Belgium’s top epidemiologist and was seen on CCTV staking out the official’s home for at least two hours in mid-May. By the next day, Conings had boobytrapped his car and disappeared into a park outside the town of Dilserbos in the municipality of Lanklaar, near the Dutch border. A manhunt that drew elite counter-terrorism teams from five countries ensued and only ended a week ago Sunday, when the mayor of Dilserbos discovered Conings’ body while mountain-biking. Preliminary reports indicate Conings died from a self-inflicted gunshot from a weapon he stole from an armoury.

During the manhunt, several Facebook groups and Telegram channels that often depicted Conings as something resembling a noble warrior protecting Western civilisation – based on his past deployments to Muslim-majority countries – drew thousands of supporters. The groups were in most cases disrupted or shut down, something that left investigators ambivalent, said one Belgian military intelligence official who was involved in the hunt.

“As someone using an intelligence background to help find him I wanted these groups open and being used because they are a potential source of information on what networks might have been assisting [Conings],” said the official, who often works undercover and cannot be identified. “But another kind of official will have legitimate duties that require them to want to shut these groups, for instance they might be using illegal speech.”

Facebook’s decision to shut one group that had tens of thousands of supporters was “not ideal for me, but I understand and support the decision,” said the official. 

Last week the mayor of a local town said that no permits had been issued for a march due to take place on Sunday that planned to move from a village to the site where Conings’ body was found. But on Sunday hundreds of supporters ignored police instructions and marched into the park, only to be stopped several hundred metres from the site Conings was found, where a shrine has been built. 

The entire situation is unnerving for Belgian Muslims  – particularly from the large North African community – who remember brutal police crackdowns on their communities in the wake of the ISIS attacks on Paris in 2015 that were orchestrated by an multinational cell of ISIS members led by Belgian residents of the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek. 

“I remember coming under suspicion that I secretly harboured sympathy for Daesh,” said Tariq, a Belgian government employee of North African descent. “I hope everyone realises how stupid it was to expect us to apologise or denounce Daesh [ISIS] now that middle class Flems want to honor someone who threatened to murder doctors for asking them to wear masks,” said Tariq, who requested to be only identified by his first name because of his government job.

Belgian extremism researcher Pieter Van Ostaeyen, who specialises in ISIS research, made the same point, tweeting a photo of the shrine built where Conings body was found. 

“The current expressions of support for Conings are being done without the support of his family and are increasing the pain felt by many of his colleagues and friends in the military,” the Belgian military intelligence official said. “Any member of the Belgian military who deployed abroad in the last ten years is likely to have either deployed with Conings or was qualified for deployment at the range where he worked. Most of the military people involved were in a great deal of pain during the search as is natural and to see it politicised by the marginal [far-right, COVID denying] ideology adds to this pain.”

The official, who had refused to answer questions about knowing Conings during the search, now admits that they had known him “pretty well, actually.”

“I knew him first from a personal security detail during a deployment abroad,” said the official, declining to name the deployment, which was probably Iraq. “And after he was part of the process of qualifying on the shooting range prior to deployments.”

The official described a “perfect, committed professional soldier,” that was selected and qualified to work with special operations and intelligence operations and had undergone rigorous background checks and testing. 

“I cannot confirm he was in any sort of elite unit but Conings was trained to specifically handle high amounts of stress and he did so wonderfully, until he did not,” said the official. 

As far as warning signs, the official was blunt that Conings would probably have only stood out if he professed some sort of far-left ideology, in what would be a conservative military environment for Belgium. 

“Did he seem particularly right-wing for a Flemish Army NCO? Not until COVID.” said the official, who declined to say more about how Conings was first flagged for dangerous social media posts in January. 

“The episode requires serious investigation,” said the official. “But for me and many others in the Belgian Army there’s the official side but there’s also a personal side. Nothing succeeded here, it's just a terrible tragedy that thank God didn’t become an even bigger one.”