Scathing report criticises police and judiciary on investigation failures

BELGIUM was told officially yesterday what it has known for months. The six girls who were kidnapped, raped and tortured by Marc Dutroux and accomplices, four of them dying, might not have suffered if the authorities had acted on information available to them in 1993.

Deputies yesterday published a scathing report on the incompetent handling of the disappearances by the authorities, and their casual failure to monitor known paedophiles released from prison.

But the report, if followed through, may serve to lance the boil of public discontent by re-establishing, politicians hope, some sense of confidence that the political system is able to respond to popular anger and reform itself.

Its searing candour in naming names and its radical reform proposals could go a long way to restoring the good name of politicians.

The main points in the 300-page report were presented to a packed parliament yesterday afternoon by the two rapporteurs of the 15-member commission of inquiry, Ms Nathalie de T'Serclaes and Mr Renaat Landuyt. The commission had sat for five months and heard 125 witnesses, the bulk of them on the 28() hours of live television that has gripped this country.

In three hours of detailed but damning reading of its findings, the deputies exposed both individual failings, bordering on criminal negligence, and fundamental weaknesses and breakdowns in communication in the highly bureaucratic Belgian justice system.

The gendarmerie, in particular, faces severe criticism for its go-it-alone approach and incompetence.

In the 1992 disappearance of Loubna Benaissa the report records, the police refused to use dogs to search for the little girl because, they said, their handlers were on holiday. The report quotes her sister, Ms Nabella Benaissa, remarking wryly: "It doesn't pay to be kidnapped during the holidays.

If the committee has its way the country's three police forces now face fundamental reform and integration; the judiciary faces a major audit; and victims and their families will get a rake of new rights in their dealings with the authorities.

Some heads will certainly have to roll, one of them the Brussels chief prosecutor, whose services are described as a shambles.

The father of one of the murdered girls, Mr Jean-Denis Lejeune, yesterday welcomed the report.