Convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux admitted today kidnapping and raping young girls but denied murder and insisted he was a pawn of a child-sex gang protected by police and politicians.
Marc Dutroux
Taking the stand for the first time, Belgium's most-hated man told a hushed courtroom he had hidden girls in a concealed dungeon under his house to protect them from prostitution.
"I accept responsibility," Dutroux said on the third day of a trial that has riveted a country struggling to come to terms with the gruesome saga. "It is regrettable."
But Dutroux, charged with kidnapping and raping six girls and murdering four of them, sought to put most of the blame on his ex-wife, Michelle Martin, and three male accomplices.
Jailed in the past for a series of violent rapes, including on minors, Dutroux faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment on his present charges. His trial is expected to last at least two months.
In often rambling and confused testimony, he contradicted accounts he had given investigators in about seven years in custody, angering lawyers for the victims' families.
Dutroux admitted a role in abducting four of the six girls who disappeared in 1995-1996 and having sex with three of them. But he denied killing any of them.
"There are four people who will never return," he said in a steady voice. "(They would not be dead) if I had never agreed to do what I did."
The last two victims - Sabine Dardenne (12) and Laetitia Delhez (14) - survived Dutroux's arrest in 1996 and were found in the makeshift dungeon to which he had built a concealed door in the basement of a house in Marcinelle in southern Belgium.
The bodies of the other four and that of a suspected accomplice were dug up with Dutroux's guidance in the gardens of two houses.
Dutroux (47) depicted himself as the victim of an authoritarian mother and a reluctant accomplice to crime, saying members of a paedophile ring with police and political protection had pressured him to help kidnap the girls.
"I didn't even know what paedophilia was," he said. "It was all Chinese to me."
Asked by the judge why he had built the trap door to conceal the dungeon, he said: "I wanted to create a hiding place to spare them from being sent to a prostitution ring."
He accused co-defendant Michel Nihoul, a convicted fraudster, and Bernard Weinstein, a Frenchman and suspected accomplice found murdered and buried in Dutroux's backyard in 1996, of planning to force the children into prostitution.
Dutroux denied killing Weinstein, which he had admitted in pre-trial custody, blaming the death on his ex-wife.
Dutroux also accused his ex-wife of failing to care for eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo - the first two victims - who died of starvation in the dungeon while he was in prison for three months for car theft and other charges.
He denied any involvement in their June 1995 kidnapping, telling the court he had found them at his home with his wife, drug addict Michel Lelievre, Nihoul and Weinstein.
Dutroux said he did not denounce his accomplices sooner because he feared for his family's safety.
