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Belgium police hunt for missing girls from Liege

In an atmosphere of despair that hangs over Liege, the biggest shock is to see children innocently enjoying themselves. As Adrienne, five, launches herself for the umpteenth time down a playground slide, her grandmother, Christine Maertens, sits on a bench thinking back.

"It is an awful feeling," said Maertens, 45, "and it hangs over the whole city. You keep thinking you have seen the little girls. You walk past a cellar ventilation duct and you imagine hearing a child's cry for help."

The probable abduction, during a street party in the early hours of June 10, of Stacy Lemmens, seven, and Nathalie Mahy, 10, has shot Belgium 11 years back in time -- to chilling memories of the notorious paedophile Marc Dutroux. Once again the Ardennes city of Liege is the focal point; it was from a town near here that Dutroux, now serving a life sentence, abducted his first two victims.

Once again this small country -- which lost a government and saw its legal and police system disgraced by the Dutroux case -- is asking itself whether enough has been done to protect its children.

There are similarities with the Dutroux case and, importantly, there is still a slim hope the girls are alive. A man with a previous child rape conviction, Abdallah Ait Oud, 38, is in preventive custody on a kidnapping charge. He denies abducting the girls and will be released tomorrow if police cannot build a case against him.

In the poor Saint-Leonard neighborhood, stepsisters Nathalie and Stacy grin from "missing" posters.

Their parents, Catherine Dizier and Thierry Lemmens, were at a street carnival with their six children on June 10. At 3am, Dizier realised the girls had disappeared.

Lemmens raised the alarm, calling in members of his motorcycling club to scour this neighborhood amid a large multiethnic population.
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