Brussels city police return 56 stolen bikes to owners

Brussels police managed to return 56 bicycles to their owners in 2022, a big improvement on the 33 bikes recovered the previous year, reports Le Soir.

The rise was mainly due to the Veloflic project that was launched in 2019. “With this project, we are trying to respond to the increasing number of bicycle thefts,” said Brussels Capital-Ixelles police zone, which estimated the daily number of thefts as between 10 and 15.

Meanwhile, Veloflic Pol Bru’s Facebook page has already gained 8,500 followers and each post is shared by between 10,000 and 18,000 users on the social media platform. “On this page, we share the bicycles details that we’ve managed to recover in the hopes of finding the rightful owner,” police explained.

Throughout last year, local police worked on a project called vélos-appats, an operation in which police place decoy bicycles in various hotspots of the city in the hope of catching bicycle thieves in the act.

Additional efforts have also been put in place to shut down illegal bicycle dealers who resell stolen bikes. “We set up small operations where an appointment is recorded with an illegal seller, who is then detained by detectives.”