BELGIUM: Marc Dutroux confessed to kidnapping and having sex with young girls after serving a prison term for multiple child rape, prosecutors at the trial of Belgium's Public Enemy No 1 told the court yesterday.
Reading a lengthy indictment that depicted Dutroux as a manipulator with no morals, public prosecutors said he denied having killed four of six abducted girls, putting the blame instead on suspected accomplices.
On the second day of a long-awaited trial for a string of crimes that rocked Belgium in the mid-1990s, Mr Michel Bourlet told how Dutroux kept the girls locked in makeshift cells in the basement of his house and raped them repeatedly.
"The autopsies [of two victims\] revealed symptoms of repeated sexual acts," Mr Bourlet told a hushed courtroom.
The prosecutor said Dutroux admitted having kidnapped and raped girls on trips to Slovakia before completing the construction of the cells for his last six victims.
"[There is a seized\] video cassette . . . on which the rape of a young girl is visible. Marc Dutroux admits the acts," he said.
The prosecution is seeking life imprisonment for Dutroux, who is in the dock with his ex-wife, Ms Michelle Martin, and two other suspects, Mr Michel Lelièvre and Mr Michel Nihoul.
Behind bulletproof glass, Dutroux jotted notes and conferred by telephone with one of his lawyers sitting in front of the dock as Mr Bourlet read the first part of the indictment.
The trial in the south-eastern Belgian town of Arlon, which opened on Monday with the selection of a 12-member jury, is expected to last at least two months.
Citing psychologists' studies, Mr Bourlet said Dutroux was a manipulator who saw himself as a victim of a hateful society.
"In his mind, all social rules are perfectly recognised, but they are either rejected as being unacceptably constraining, or used for his own benefit," he said.
The Belgian Prime Minister, Mr Guy Verhofstadt, called for a shortening of judicial procedures to tackle a chronic backlog of cases.
"[The Dutroux case\] has to be a lesson for the future because such trials have to be dealt with sooner," he told VRT television.
After Dutroux's arrest in 1996, police found two girls alive in the basement cells and dug up the bodies of four others and that of a suspected accomplice in the south of the country.
Public outrage swept the country over inept rival police and judiciary investigations into the girls' disappearance.
Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Brussels in October 1996 in one of the largest demonstrations in Belgian history, demanding justice as well as resignations.
The delay in arresting him and finding the girls prompted conspiracy theories about Dutroux receiving protection from people in high places alleged to belong to a child sex ring.
A separate investigation has yet to find any evidence of such a network, but defence lawyers planned to play on those doubts to argue that their client was a cog in a far bigger machine, and not a lone pervert.
"We clearly find, in this case, material proof that people other than the accused . . . frequented the cells," said a statement by one of Dutroux's lawyers, circulated to reporters before it was presented in court.
The lawyers asked why the prosecution had ignored evidence such as hundreds of hair strands found in the house that did not match those of Dutroux or the other suspects.
In describing the relationships among the suspects, Mr Bourlet referred to allegations that might link Dutroux to a ring.
- (Reuters)