What did Brussels police find behind the counters of the city centre?

The Brussels

Place

Brussels

City where the reported commercial inspections and seizures took place.

Why it matters

City where the reported commercial inspections and seizures took place.

About

The City of Brussels is the largest municipality and historical centre of the Brussels-Capital Region, as well as the capital of the French Community of Belgium, the Flemish Region, and Belgium. The City of Brussels is also the administrative centre of the European Union, as it hosts a number of principal EU institutions in its European Quarter.

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For residents, visitors and people working around the capital’s busiest commercial districts, the result is more than an unusually varied police haul. It points to illicit products circulating through ordinary-looking businesses, alongside suspected undeclared work, public-order offences and possible human trafficking. The operation concerns Brussels as a city—not the EU institutions headquartered there—although some of the products fall under European safety rules.

The City Team consists of three full-time-equivalent officers and checks horeca premises, vape and CBD shops, sex shops, nail salons and souvenir stores. It works alone or alongside the Brussels Labour Auditorate, the Federal Public Service for Public Health, the Federal Public Service for Employment and the National Employment Office, known as ONEM. That mix of partners reflects the problem’s breadth: a single inspection can raise questions about employment, licensing, consumer safety and criminal law.

According to the annual tally, the unit issued 549 reports under criminal law or the general police regulation and another 216 for road-traffic offences. Several dozen people were detained. Police also listed 366 packets of cigarettes, 67 kilograms of shisha tobacco, 53 nitrous-oxide cylinders, 353 counterfeit articles, 1,500 fireworks and 8,387 units of poppers among the seizures. Goods were valued at about €385,000, excluding prohibited weapons and counterfeit articles, while approximately €37,000 in cash brought the announced total above €420,000.

Those headline numbers require some caution. Police did not publish a case-by-case breakdown showing which products came from which premises, how the medicines were classified, or how many reports led to prosecution or conviction. A police report records a suspected infringement; it is not itself a finding of guilt. The announced market value is likewise an estimate rather than money finally recovered for the public purse.

Belgium’s public-health rules help explain the large vape total. Disposable electronic cigarettes have been prohibited from sale nationwide since 1 January 2025. The FPS Public Health says its inspectors prioritise illegal products and work in multidisciplinary teams with police and other regulators. In January 2025, the service and Brussels police seized more than 12,000 illegal vapes at Galerie Agora, including disposable devices and products exceeding the permitted nicotine level. Inspection chief Paul Van den Meerssche framed such targeted operations as necessary to protect public health, “in particular that of young people.”

The medicines require a separate distinction. Seizure does not automatically mean every unit was counterfeit. They may instead have lacked Belgian authorisation, traceability or a lawful sales channel; the City Team’s published total does not specify which. Belgium’s medicines agency, the AFMPS, warns that products sold outside regulated channels can involve incorrect doses, contamination or dangerous interactions. In a separate 2025 central-Brussels case, it reported 5,264 unauthorised medicines seized from a sex shop and urged consumers to buy only through legal pharmacies under professional supervision.

At European level, the Tobacco Products Directive sets baseline safety, nicotine, notification and labelling rules for e-cigarettes, while Belgium has gone further by banning disposable devices. The EU’s Falsified Medicines Directive also requires safety features and a common logo for lawful online pharmacies. Brussels therefore illustrates the enforcement gap between rules agreed nationally or across the EU and what remains available at street level.

The next meaningful test is not another inventory but the legal follow-through: which closures become permanent, which files reach court and whether repeated inspections reduce reoffending or merely displace sales. PolBru