Public enraged at freedom of a known abuser

AGONISED Belgium shook its collective head in grief at the announcement early on Thursday of the discovery of the body of Loubna Benaissa (9) 200 metres from her home, 4 1/2 years after she disappeared.

Anger turned to rage as journalists began to report an extraordinary catalogue of errors that allowed a known paedophile, Patrick Derochette (33), to escape detection for so long. Previously jailed for four separate sexual assaults on children in the 1980s, he is now reported to have confessed.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, gangs of Moroccan youths smashed shop fronts and rampaged through streets in the Ixelles district of Brussels. Order was only restored when Loubna's grieving sister, Ms Nabela Benaissa (18), came out on to the streets to urge calm.

"We ask you to control your anger in these difficult days," she appealed to her community. "Loubna suffered enough on this earth. Let her go in peace. Tomorrow is her funeral. We do not want a riot."

Nabela Benaissa's figure, head swathed modestly in the traditional scarf of her faith, has become a familiar sight alongside the parents of the disappeared and murdered children since the Dutroux case last summer. As spokeswoman for her parents, whose French is poor, her single-minded determination to publicise police neglect of her sister's case and quiet appeals for calm have won enormous admiration.

Loubna disappeared in August 1992. She was walking the 300 yards from home to the local supermarket for a yoghurt. She never reached it, meeting her death after being raped in a small garage that she and her family passed every day. Her body was found in the basement in a rusting steel case among car parts, its lid weighed down by an old engine.

The half-hearted police inquiries which followed the disappearance were abandoned after only a few weeks without even the usual appointment of an instructing magistrate to supervise the case. Clue after clue seems to have been disregarded.

A neighbour of the garage reported hearing screams at the relevant time - the police ignored the claim. A young friend of Loubna's reported seeing her alive a day later in the back of a car whose number she noted. The car, it now emerges, belonged to relations of Derochette, but the police believed there was no chance she had taken it down correctly. In fact, only one number was wrong.

And although Derochette was interviewed after the disappearance the only known local paedophile to have been in the country at the time - his story, claiming he was at lunch with his brother, was never checked. Stranger still, when investigators went back to look for his file in police headquarters, it had gone missing. It was found again, filed in the wrong place, only when a new vigorous team of detectives was put on the case in the wake of the Dutroux affair.

And the whole judicial system will have to answer questions about its handling of a man described by a psychologist in court in 1984 as a psychopath with perverse psychosexual tendencies. .. incapable of controlling his impulses". That time, after rape, he tried to beat to death his 11-year-old victim with a steel bar. Previously imprisoned twice for short periods for similar offences, the court sent him to jail for a month-and-a-half and then pronounced him "cured".

The echoes of Dutroux are everywhere - spiced, it seems, with the casual, racist disregard of an immigrant family.

After a service today in the city's Grand Mosque, Loubna's body will be flown to Tangiers for burial.