Marc Dutroux - trial of the century

By Gareth Harding
Chief European Correspondent

CHARLEROI, Belgium, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Take a grimy industrial town surrounded by slag heaps and smokestacks, choose a sinister-looking red-bricked house on a dingy street opposite a railway line, construct a dungeon in the basement of the house, let a serial rapist run amok while a bungling police force scrabbles around for clues and you have the perfect storyboard for a low-budget horror movie.

The tragedy for Belgium is that this is not a film script and the gruesome activities that took place at 128 Chaussee de Philippeville in a rundown district of Charleroi eight years ago are far from being fictitious.

Instead the house, which is now boarded up and daubed in graffiti, was the real-life torture chamber of Marc Dutroux, the convicted pedophile whose acts traumatized a nation, helped topple the government and brought world-wide notoriety to this small rain-swept country of 10 million people.

On Monday, Dutroux will enter a purpose-built courtroom in the sleepy Ardennes town of Arlon and face formal charges of kidnapping, torturing and murdering four young girls, abducting and raping two others and killing an accomplice who threatened to spill the beans on him.

But it is not just Dutroux that stands accused. Also in the dock will be Belgium's police force, which displayed staggering levels of incompetence attempting to track down the unemployed electrician; the justice system, which allowed the convicted rapist to strike again and again with impunity; and a political class that is widely suspected of narrowing the scope of the trial to cover its own back.

"This is not an ordinary trial," says Anne, a 58-year old grandmother from Charleroi who preferred not to give her second name. "It has profound repercussions for Belgian society and for the police, the justice system and the politicians."

With 500 witnesses due to take the stand and over 1,000 journalists expected to descend on Arlon over the next two months, the trial is certainly not going to be a run-of-the-mill affair.

For a start, the eight years that have elapsed since Dutroux is alleged to have carried out his sordid deeds have allowed Belgians to conduct their own popular trial of the 47-year old father of three and the state institutions that repeatedly failed to bring him to justice.

"Finding a jury that does not already have an opinion is obviously impossible," argues Xavier Magnee, a Dutroux lawyer who is expected to admit his client abducted girls but was not responsible for their deaths. "If I plead poorly, he will get life. If I plead well, he will get life."

In an opinion poll published in La Derniere Heure newspaper Thursday, two thirds of interviewees said Dutroux should get the death penalty -- a practice outlawed in Belgium since 1996.

The poll also revealed a disturbing level of distrust for the Belgian justice system, with 88 percent of interviewees believing the trial will not get to the bottom of the affair, 68 percent arguing Dutroux was protected by senior politicians and 65 percent stating that the police had failed in their duties.

"The Belgian justice system is rotten," says Erick Hardenne, a 39-year old postman from Charleroi who strongly believes Dutroux deserves the death penalty if found guilty. "Everyone here believes there are people in government implicated in this affair. But they don't want any of the big-shots to fall: hence the brakes on justice."

It is easy to see why Belgians have so little faith in either the police or the judiciary, because both institutions were found sorely lacking when Dutroux was at large.

In 1989, the Brussels-born son of teachers was sentenced to 13 years in prison for a series of violent rapes he carried out, with the full complicity of his wife, between 1983 and 1985. He was released three years later after a psychological report concluded he posed no danger to society.

Events were to prove otherwise. Within months of his release, Dutroux started building a prison cell in the basement of 128 Chaussee de Philippeville. How do we know this? Because two years after an informer told the police of the dark goings-on, an internal police note was finally issued stating: "It has been reported to us that the suspect may be constructing a prison cell in one of his houses in Charleroi, in which he intends to hold children before selling them abroad."

By the time this memo was circulated, Dutroux had struck twice. On 24 June 1995, he kidnapped two young girls -- Julie and Melissa -- and chained them up in his Charleroi cellar. Two more girls -- An and Eefje -- were to follow eight weeks later.

While Dutroux was serving a three-month sentence for car-theft in December 1995, police called at his Charleroi house twice to investigate accusations of child-abduction. On one occasion, a police officer heard the sound of children screaming below, but the owner managed to convince him it was his own kids playing in the garden.

Shortly after his release in March 1996, Dutroux abducted two more girls -- Sabine and Laetitia -- and took them to his dungeon. But this time, a witness noted the first letters of the pedophile's car number-plate and on Aug. 15 he was arrested.

Sabine and Laetitia were freed, but the police arrived too late to save the other four girls, whose bodies were later found buried nearby.

"We don't know everything about what happened," says Paul Marchal, the father of An. "But we do know that if the authorities had done their jobs properly, our children would be alive today."

Marchal will testify in the Arlon courtroom - "It's the last things I can do for my daughter," he says. So will Sabine Dardenne, one of the two victims who were dragged alive out of Dutroux's dungeon after 79 days of rape, torture and starvation. "I've been waiting for eight years for this moment," the 20-year old said in a rare newspaper interview last week. "I want to look Dutroux in the eyes and show him that despite everything he made me suffer, I have not gone mad."

But the parents of Julie and Melissa, two other girls who Dutroux abducted and is accused of murdering, will not be making the trip to Arlon. "It would be absurd for us to take part in the trial. It's going to be a big circus," says Gino Russo, father of Melissa.