The two suspects who were arrested on Thursday in connection with the disappearance of a Belgian couple in Tenerife were presented to an investigating judge. He served them with a European arrest warrant issued by the Spanish courts and placed them in detention, the federal prosecutor’s office said this Friday. The council chamber and the indictment chamber will have to decide whether the two men will be extradited to Spain.
The couple, Laura Trappeniers (66 years old) and Marc Oblrechts (71 years old), had lived in Tenerife for several years. They were reported missing at the end of April. The two were last seen on April 22, two days before the wanted poster.
On April 27, the woman’s badly mutilated body was found in the Atlantic Ocean. There is still no trace of her husband.
Immediately after the disappearance, the Hal-Vilvoorde public prosecutor’s office opened a file at the request of the Spanish authorities, but when it turned out that the death was violent, the file was passed to the federal level.
On Thursday, two people were arrested in Belgium and a third in Spain. The two people arrested in Belgium are said to be a father and son from the Charleroi region.
They were in Tenerife when Laura Trappeniers and Marc Olbrechts disappeared, but returned to Belgium the same day the woman’s body was found.
The third person arrested in Spain has Belgian nationality. It is not yet clear what role each would have played. For the moment, from what we know, the motive concerns a commercial and financial dispute in Spain.
