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For AFP 
2h ago
Brussels, Belgium – A French-Ivorian man and his Belgian wife were convicted of killing a British businessman in a Belgian seaside resort a quarter of a century ago.
A court in the Belgian city of Bruges on Tuesday night found Jean-Claude Lacote and his wife Hilde Van Acker guilty of shooting Marcus Mitchell, 44, to death.
Lacote, 54, and Van Acker, 57, were arrested in the Ivory Coast two years ago after living a colorful life on the run in the United States and Africa.
They had pleaded not guilty but now face possible life in prison.
The trial, which began on March 5, revealed multiple lives of Lacote, who has been a clothing merchant in the United States, was a television producer in South Africa and ran an airline in the Ivory Coast.
Prosecutors described the couple as “professional criminals” and said the murder was related to an attempted fraud.
On May 28, 1996, aviation executive Mitchell was found dead in De Haan, an exclusive Belgian seaside resort on the North Sea, with two bullets to the head.
Investigators quickly discovered that he had been in regular contact with Lacote and Van Acker by phone.
According to prosecutors, Mitchell had loaned Lacote a large sum of money for a red herring about a possible lucrative deal and the couple had fallen out.
The investigation yielded extraordinary details of the couple’s lives since the murder.
Television reality show
They were arrested on June 2, 1996, shortly after the body was found, at Charleroi airport on the outskirts of Brussels.
Released on bail that same year, they fled to the United States, where they married and founded a clothing business in Miami, Florida.
In 2007, Belgian investigators traced Lacote to South Africa, but were unable to organize his arrest.
In South Africa, Lacote produced a reality TV show about true crime stories and claimed to have excellent relations with the local police.
The couple moved to the Ivory Coast and lived there for a decade, raising a daughter born in 2007, but was eventually arrested in Abidjan in November 2019.
Lacote had taken over an aviation company backed by a Lebanese businessman and gained access to high-level Ivorian political circles.
But he said he had refused a position as a government minister to raise his daughter in a better environment than the one he knew.
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