Two more individuals linked to the murder of Belgian plumber Johan van der Heyden have been detained on Tuesday.
Dutch police arrested a 42-year-old woman from Bergen op Zoom and a 23-year-old man from Middelburg.
The two were suspected as among the killers of van der Heyden who went missing in June 2019 while crossing the border and was believed to have been hostage-taken in his car for a long period.
Authorities said suspects may have assumed that van der Heyden was wealthy.
He was believed to have killed in a bid to cover their tracks.
Last January, the victim’s remains were found in a mixing bucket filled with hardened concrete in the Scheldt-Rijn canal in the Noord-Brabant village of Nieuw-Vossemeer.
A chainsaw was also found in March, which authorities believed was linked to the crime.
In total, police from the Netherlands and Belgium have caught eight persons, with the latest having taken into custody on suspicion of theft by force, extortion, deliberate deprivation of liberty, and hostage-taking.
Four others have been released but were still considered as suspects, while a Dutch woman from Zoersel, who had a relationship with the victim, was considered one of the suspects.
In testimonies given to the police in December 2019, the underage sons of Wanda, a 39-year-old Netherlands-based sex worker who was linked to the killing, said that the man had been killed and chopped up with his body parts later burned in a campfire.
Wanda is currently behind bars with his 30-year-old partner identified only as Nicky S after they were arrested in August.
Wanda was said to be van der Heyden’s client before getting killed.
Police said the two minors’ testimonies coincided with a separate statement of a witness from the site, allegedly where the victim’s remains were burned as the area smelled like “fried bacon” for days.
PHOTO CREDIT: PIXABAY
