Belgium's Public Enemy No. 1, self-confessed killer and child rapist Marc Dutroux, finally goes on trial next week, seven years after the crimes of which he is accused traumatized a nation.
Dutroux, 47, whose trial starts on Monday, faces charges of kidnapping and raping six young girls in makeshift cells in the basement of his house before killing four of them.
PHOTO: EPA
The Belgian legal system is rarely fast, and investigators had to sift through 400,000 pages of evidence and a vast number of apparently false leads.
Dutroux is expected to plead guilty on some counts but his lawyers plan to depict him as merely part of a wider pedophile ring. Prosecutors say they have no such evidence.
His wife, Michelle Martin, and two other suspects will also be in the dock on similar charges in the southeastern town of Arlon, near where the last of the crimes were committed in 1996.
The Dutroux case provoked a wave of public outrage and contributed to the defeat of former Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene's government in a 1999 general election.
Belgians were not only revolted by the crimes but also by police and judiciary bungling of the search for the girls, some of whom had been missing for a year.
The arrest of other suspects and the appearance of witnesses making sweeping accusations prompted conspiracy theories about a vast high-society child sex ring acting with impunity.
Claude Javeau, a sociologist at the Free University of Brussels, said Dutroux came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the Belgian state.
Dutroux has been in custody since his arrest in August 1996, when he led police to a house in the city of Charleroi, where his last captives -- 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez, 14 -- were found alive in the basement cells.
"I was his `lady,'" Dardenne said in a rare interview.
"That's what he would tell me," she said.
Dutroux later showed police where the bodies of four more girls and a suspected accomplice were buried in the backyard of two other houses.
Two of the victims, 8-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, had died of starvation in the cells.
Police had had Dutroux, a convicted child rapist, under surveillance, but never informed those searching for the girls.
They had searched his house and heard the girls' cries but failed to find the false door that hid the tiny cells.
Parliamentary inquiries later revealed a police and judiciary riven by rivalries that had conducted parallel probes.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
Forecasters in Europe yesterday warned of exceptional heat as record temperatures driven by a “heat dome” push temperatures well above seasonal norms across the continent. The surge follows a record-breaking Monday, with France logging its hottest day in the month of May on record, its weather agency said, and the UK also posting unprecedented highs. A so-called “heat dome” of warm air from northern Africa trapped under a high-pressure system over western Europe is behind the high temperatures not usually seen until high summer. Restrictions on outdoor work were imposed in parts of Italy, beaches in southwest France filled earlier than usual and
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
RSS