FRANCE: A French forest warden who has confessed to the rape and murder of six girls in Belgium and France may well have killed more victims, a Belgian prosecutor said.
Mr Michel Fourniret (62), nicknamed the "Ogre of the Ardennes" by the Belgian media, has been in custody since last year in connection with a separate abduction case.
This week he confessed to six murders after his estranged wife denounced him to Belgian police. She accused him of nine murders, and the public prosecutor, Mr Cedric Visart de Bocarme, hinted that the number could rise still further.
He told RTBF radio there were unexplained gaps between spates of killings, which raised fears of more victims.
"We still have a number of concerns about periods when he appears to have been inactive but for which we may yet discover other acts," the prosecutor said.
He added that Mr Fourniret may only have admitted to crimes which happened too long ago to be prosecuted.
"It seems that that could be one of the motives, why he is only confessing for acts he believes to be covered by a statute of limitation and can no longer be prosecuted. But that's a hypothesis," Mr Visart de Bocarme said.
The case comes as the country is still recovering emotionally from the case of Marc Dutroux, Belgium's most notorious criminal.
Dutroux was sentenced to life in prison on June 22nd after a three-month trial for kidnapping and raping six girls and killing four of them.
French authorities said they now planned to reopen files dating back to the 1970s on a number of disappearances and unsolved killings of young girls near the Franco-Belgian border and elsewhere in France.
"We must check if his statements correspond to actual disappearances or actual killings," said Mr Yves Charpenel, the state prosecutor of the city of Reims, who is leading the French investigation.
In 1984 Mr Fourniret was jailed in France for three years for a sex offence.
He has been under arrest in Belgium for a year as part of an investigation into the attempted kidnap of a girl in the southern town of Ciney.
Mr Visart de Bocarme said the suspect may have eluded detection because the crimes were committed on both sides of the border and there was no common European register of paedophiles.
Four of the six girls were French, and the other two Belgian.
They included 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet, whom he confessed to kidnapping, raping and strangling to death in 1989.
Her disappearance has mystified investigators for the last 15 years, and her body has yet to be found.
A French police team interrogated Mr Fourniret through the night on Wednesday in the Belgian town of Dinant.
Mr Charpenel said investigations would likely involve a chateau near Sedan in the French Ardennes where the suspect lived.
Mr Visart de Bocarme said he had a number of clues as to where Elizabeth's body might be buried, but that more investigation work needed to be done to limit the search area.