A psychiatrist concluded two years ago that the suspect in a deadly knife attack on a Belgian crèche did not need to be sent to a mental institution although he heard ”voices in his head”, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
”There’s proof that he suffered from psychological problems, but the psychiatric report will have to show that,” the Belga news agency reported his court-appointed lawyer Jaak Haentjens as saying.
Twenty-year-old Kim De Gelder has been charged with killing two infants, aged six and nine months, and a 54-year-old nurse in a macabre knife attack at a nursery in Dendermonde, south-west of Antwerp, on Friday.
He was also charged on Monday with the stabbing murder of a 73-year-old woman at her home in Beveren, near Antwerp, earlier this month.
”At the age of 15 or 16, he suffered from a deep depression and had strange behaviour,” Haentjens said.
”When he was 18, his parents wanted to have him committed but it didn’t happen because he had treatment.
”A psychiatrist said that committing him was not necessary. Kim was hearing voices in his head at the time,” he added.
Haentjens was speaking after a Belgian court on Tuesday ordered De Gelder to be kept in custody.
After an initial conversation with his client, he hinted on Monday evening that De Gelder had implicitly acknowledged committing the knife attack in the Dendermonde nursery and that he ”understands that what he did was inhuman”.
However, the lawyer was more cautious on Tuesday. He said that De Gelder ”doesn’t remember the three or four hours in Dendermonde”. — Sapa-AFP