Car Again Smashes Into Flemalle Sports Hall in Belgium

A car crashed into the facade of the Louis Melin omnisports hall in Flemalle, in Belgium’s province of Liege, overnight, the second such collision at the same building in three years. Police found the wrecked vehicle at around 6:30 am on Thursday 10 September, but its occupants had already fled, according to VRT NWS. No one was inside the hall at the time, and there were no injuries.

The crash echoes the spectacular March 2023 accident in which professional footballer Sofian Kiyine launched his car off the roundabout opposite the building and flew into the hall. Coming just two years after a costly renovation to repair that damage, the repeat event has renewed questions about safety at a site the mayor describes as inherently dangerous.

What happened

The vehicle, which bore a French registration plate, struck the building’s facade during the night of Wednesday to Thursday. Flemalle’s mayor, Sophie Themont, said tracks on the road suggested the driver hit a bollard and briefly left the ground before embedding in the wall — this time lower down than in 2023.

“The facts were discovered at 6:30 am and the perpetrators fled, so we are waiting for information from the police,” Themont told RTL Info. She added that the hall was empty. “We were lucky: there were no children present, since the accident took place at night.”

According to La DH, the damage is significant and a structural expert was sent to the scene, with the day’s activities cancelled. The newspaper reported that the car may have come from Liege and that investigators are trying to determine whether it had been stolen and abandoned, or not. Surveillance cameras did not identify the occupants. Local media in the French-speaking Walloon region gave the incident extensive coverage, while Flemish outlets picked it up because of the Kiyine connection.

The 2023 precedent

On 30 March 2023, Sofian Kiyine — then a player at Belgian side OH Leuven — drove at high speed over the roundabout facing the building and flew into the sports hall. He was the only person injured, seriously but not fatally, and children had just moved to the changing rooms moments before. “Fortunately no other vehicles or persons were involved in the accident,” his club said at the time, as VRT NWS reported.

It later emerged that Kiyine had been driving at up to 150 km/h and had 1.6 grams of alcohol per litre of blood — roughly eight to 14 standard drinks for a man — as VRT NWS detailed. The Liege prosecutor’s office had described witnesses seeing a car overtaken at “insane speed” that failed to brake at the roundabout.

The legal fallout proved contentious. In March 2024, a police court found Kiyine guilty but granted him a suspension of sentence — meaning no penalty and nothing on his criminal record. The prosecutor’s office appealed, calling the ruling too lenient. In December 2025, the Liege court upheld the suspension. Ahead of that appeal, the prosecutor had sought a 2,400-euro fine, a three-month driving ban and a mandatory alcohol interlock for a year, according to La DH. Kiyine was also involved in a further serious crash in July 2025, again at a roundabout and this time in Liege, where he tested positive for alcohol.

Amid all this, the building itself was repaired at considerable public expense. After the 2023 impact left structural stability problems, all the hall’s beams were reinforced and the floor was completely replaced. The renovation cost about 630,000 euros, largely covered by insurance, plus a 139,000-euro subsidy from the Walloon region for the new flooring, QU4TRE reported when the hall fully reopened in September 2024.

Why the site keeps recurring

The Louis Melin hall sits on a regional road directly opposite a roundabout — a geometry that has now twice funneled vehicles into the building. Because the road is a regional one, responsibility for any physical safety measures rests not with the municipality but with the Walloon regional authorities.

That is the crux of Themont’s appeal. “Here we are on a regional road and adequate measures must be taken,” she said, expressing hope that Walloon Road Safety Minister Francois Desquesnes will respond. The appeal crosses party lines: the mayor belongs to the Socialist Party (PS), while Desquesnes is a member of Les Engages.

The possibilities typically floated for such locations include barriers, bollards, speed-reduction measures or a redesign of the roundabout approach. None would be unusual in Belgium, where roundabouts fronting buildings on fast regional roads have drawn similar concerns elsewhere.

What to watch

The immediate questions are who was driving the French-registered car and why it ended up in the hall — whether this was an accident, recklessness, or a crime involving a stolen vehicle. Police are still gathering evidence and had yet to identify the occupants.

Longer term, the incident sharpens a broader debate about the site’s design. Having spent hundreds of thousands of euros to repair the hall once, local officials now face the unsettling prospect that the same thing could happen again — and that the fix, if it comes, will depend on a regional government rather than on the town itself.

For the clubs that use the hall — minifootball, basketball and gymnastics — the disruption is again immediate, even if, this time, the timing spared the people inside. Themont’s pointed remark that “we were lucky” carries an implicit warning: luck, as this week’s crash shows, is not a safety policy.