A survivor from a harrowing 2016 Islamic terror attack at Brussel’s Zaventem Airport successfully petitioned doctors to end her life via euthanasia. Though the attack that claimed scores of lives and injured hundreds originally more spared Shanti De Corte from horrific death, eventually the mental toll of fear, depression, and anxiety wrought from the terror proved too much.
The Daily Mail noted that De Corte’s life-ending decision is legal in her native Belgium:
Despite attending a psychiatric hospital in her home town of Antwerp for rehabilitation and taking a range of anti-depressant medications, Shanti was unable to shake the spectre of depression and attempted suicide on two different occasions in 2018 and 2020.
Earlier this year, the troubled young woman opted to be euthanised – a procedure which is legal in Belgium, and died on May 7, 2022 after two psychiatrists approved her request.
Social media posts from De Corte in the period between enduring the terrorist attack and ending her life provided a glimpse into her daily routines.
“I get a few medications for breakfast. And up to 11 antidepressants a day. I couldn’t live without it,” one said. In another, she wrote: “With all the medications I take, I feel like a ghost that can’t feel anything anymore. Maybe there were other solutions than medications.”
After alerting the media to her daughter’s life-ending decision, mother Marielle said her daughter never recovered from that day in 2016. “[It] really cracked her, she never felt safe after that,” she said. “She didn’t want to go anywhere where other people were, out of fear. She also had frequent panic attacks and she never got rid of it.”
De Corte’s futile battle with anguish and anxiety produced a tormented life in the years following the terrorist attack. In 2018, she was alleged to have attempted suicide after a fellow patient sexually assaulted her. Again in 2020 she made an unsuccessful attempt, after which she entered into communication with a group known to defend the right to “death in dignity.”
Eventually, the mental toll, coupled with the constant use of antidepressants and conversations with euthanasia-supportive groups, De Corte was able to get consent from two separate doctors and proceed with her state-sanctioned premature death.
The Daily Mail noted of her final moments:
Euthanasia, defined as the practice of intentionally ending a person’s life to relieve pain and suffering, is legal in Belgium for an individual who is in ‘a medically futile condition of constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be alleviated, resulting from a serious and incurable disorder caused by illness or accident’.
Shanti’s formal request to be euthanised was approved earlier this year by two psychiatrists, according to RTBF.
‘The woman was euthanised on May 7, 2022, surrounded by her family,’ the report said.
In one final touching post on social media the day she was euthanised, Shanti wrote: ‘I was laughing and crying. Until the last day. I loved and was allowed to feel what true love is.
‘Now I will go away in peace. Know that I miss you already.’
"*" indicates required fields