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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but