# A Night Shop Owner Was Killed in Ixelles, in the Hours When a Shop Is at Its Most Exposed > Several people forced their way into a shop on rue de la Paix at about two in the morning. The man who ran it with his wife died, and she was tied up and shut in the cellar. - Source: Belgium Crown - Canonical URL: https://belgiumcrown.com/article/ixelles-night-shop-owner-killed-robbery - Author: Mathieu Vandenberghe - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-08-04T11:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-04T11:30:00.000Z - Tags: Ixelles, Brussels, Policing, Crime --- A night shop owner was killed during a robbery in Ixelles in the early hours of Tuesday. Several people forced their way into the premises on rue de la Paix at around two in the morning. The man who ran the shop with his wife, aged 67, died. His wife was tied up and shut in the cellar, freed herself, found him, and called the police. The Brussels public prosecutor has opened an investigation and handed it to the federal judicial police. The office said the exact circumstances have not been established. What was taken, if anything, is not yet clear, and no arrests have been announced. Nothing about the wider pattern should be read into a single case, and the investigation has barely begun. What can be said is why this category of business is the one that keeps appearing in this category of crime. A night shop trades in the hours when everything around it is shut, holds cash because a share of its customers pay in cash, and is typically run by one or two people who are often the owners. Those three facts sit together, and they are the reason the trade is a target rather than any particular failure by the people in it. The policing question underneath is structural and specific to this city. Brussels divides nineteen communes into six police zones, so a response depends on which zone a street falls in and on how well the zones talk to one another. Serious cases go to the federal judicial police, as this one has, but the first hour belongs to whichever local zone the shop happens to sit in. The case also arrives in the middle of an argument about crime in Brussels that was already running, and that has been picked up abroad. It is worth keeping the two apart. A killing during a robbery is a criminal investigation with a family at the centre of it, not a data point, and it should be allowed to be that first. --- Originally published by Belgium Crown. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://belgiumcrown.com/article/ixelles-night-shop-owner-killed-robbery.