The devil's work - Telegraph
The devil's work
Marc Dutroux 
12:10AM GMT 22 Feb 2004
On March 1 Marc Dutroux, the most vilified man in Belgium, enters the courtroom. But he is not the only one who will be on trial - the whole of the country's liberal establishment will be in the dock, reports William Langley
Clattering down a courthouse corridor in spike heels and a tight, black suit, 44-year-old Martine Van Praet pauses briefly to reflect on two immediate problems: how to defend a client an entire nation believes to be guilty; and where to find a bed for the night.
"The hotels won't have me," she says. "They have all turned me away. Of course, they are giving the prosecutors free rooms. The system is supposed to be fair to everyone, but this is the reality."
In eight days' time, one of the biggest trials to be held in Europe since the Nuremburg tribunals will open in the small, southern Belgian town of Arlon. Marc Dutroux, a 49-year-old unemployed electrician is accused of kidnapping six girls and murdering four of them, including two eight-year-olds who were chained up and starved to death in a concrete dungeon built beneath his house. With 600 potential witnesses, 1,300 accredited journalists arriving from all over the world, hundreds of additional police and court officials on duty, and untold numbers of members of the public seeking places in the tiny courthouse, the trial is already assuming the dimensions of a notable spectacle.
Related Articles
Dutroux faces trial in Belgium
01 May 2003
But its real significance lies in the sense - deeply held among millions who have followed the case - that not only Dutroux and his three alleged accomplices are on trial, but the liberal Belgian state itself. It is around this groundswell of popular outrage and scepticism that Ms Van Praet, a convent-educated, divorced mother, intends to build her defence.
Dutroux claims that he was merely the front man for an international paedophile ring that comprised some of the most powerful political and business figures in Europe. His job, he says, was to abduct girls to order, and make them available for abuse by others who remain not only at large but - in many cases - in important public positions. Many believe him, and point to the extraordinarily long time - seven years - that it has taken to bring him to trial, and the catalogue of failures in the handling of the case as evidence of a vast establishment conspiracy to cover up the truth.
If Dutroux - currently occupying a padded cell in Arlon jail - is the most despised man in Belgium, his glamorous, crimson-nailed lawyer is proving scarcely more popular. Ms Van Praet speaks warmly of her client, depicting him as both the unwitting patsy of sinister state interests and an essentially decent man. "If you met Marc," she says, "I'm sure that you would sympathise with him. We get on extremely well. I know it sounds shocking, but that is how it is."
One of the things Ms Van Praet says she most likes about him is that he has never attempted to flirt with her during their regular meetings in Arlon jail. "You get some clients," she sniffs, "who just stare at your breasts for hours. But with him I've never had as much as an unwholesome look."
She took on the case last year, when Dutroux, having fired his previous legal team, wrote personally to ask her for help. A fellow prisoner had apparently recommended Ms Van Praet's services, and when the letter arrived at her office on Brussels's rue Americaine she didn't hesitate. "He needed a lawyer," she says, "and my job is to defend people. I had no doubts about taking the case. Everyone has the right to a defence. It is a feature of democracy."
Fast-talking and strikingly attired, Ms Van Praet was born and raised in Brussels, and took up law, she says, "because I like people", and "to stop my parents giving me so much s***". But her razzmatazz attempts to portray Dutroux as an innocent may be a career move too far in a country where the horrors of the case are never far away.
Charged alongside Dutroux are his 45-year-old wife, Michele Martin, a former schoolteacher, Michel Lelievre, a petty thief who allegedly abetted the kidnaps, and Jean-Michel Nihoul, a flamboyant, 63-year-old Brussels businessman, the supposed organiser of sex orgies for exclusive clients.
If the stakes are high for the defendants, they are no lower for the Belgian government. For already the Dutroux case has exposed a scarcely believable degree of official incompetence and complacency. "We don't know everything about what happened," says Paul Marchal, a schoolteacher from Hasselt, whose 17-year-old daughter, An, was kidnapped by Dutroux in August 1995, and later buried in the garden of an associate. "But we do know that if the authorities had done their jobs properly, our children would be alive today."
Long before his arrest in August 1996, Dutroux was known to the police as a paedophile. He had been jailed for child rape in 1989, but under Belgium's ultra-liberal parole rules was freed after serving only three years of a 13-year sentence. An assessment made prior to his release stated that he was no longer a danger to the public. Within a year, the police were assured otherwise. Dutroux, claimed an informer, had already resumed his activities.
This was no routine tip-off. The informer, Claude Thirault, offered detailed evidence, including that Dutroux had built a concrete bunker under his house to hold his victims. He further described the kind of girls Dutroux was looking for. They should not be too well-developed physically, but slender, with long hair - the kind of girls who would always look a little younger than they were. How did Thirault know all this? Because Dutroux had offered him £3,500 for each such girl he could procure.
No serious attempt was made to investigate Thirault's allegations. No special surveillance was mounted on Dutroux's home. His bank statements - now known to have contained regular payments of up to £20,000 at a time - were not looked at, nor was his phone tapped. In the summer of 1995, two years after Thirault's tip-off, an internal police memo was finally issued, saying: "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." Still nothing was done. Dutroux's own mother warned the police that her son was "a vile and incorrigible man" who needed watching.
Most incredible of all was the disclosure that in the early autumn of 1995 several officers from the Charleroi force finally called at Dutroux's house to investigate the dungeon report. After a cursory inspection, they accepted the owner's explanation that the underground works were to improve his drainage system. And that the screams of children they could hear were those of his own three young offspring playing at the back of the house.
In early August, 1996, 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez, a factory worker's daughter from Bertrix in the Ardennes, was abducted while walking home from the public swimming pool. Three days later, a local man came forward to tell the police he had seen a suspicious-looking white van in the area, with two "dirty-looking types" inside. And, yes, he could remember the first three letters of the licence plate. They were LNE - his sister's initials. A check showed that such a van was registered to Marc Dutroux of 128, chaussee de Philippeville, Marcinelle, on the outskirts of Charleroi, a shabby industrial town south of Brussels. Dutroux was picked up that night.
On August 15 police broke through the concrete floor of Dutroux's house in Marcinelle. Beneath it, in the purpose-built dungeon, were Laetitia and 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne, who had been kidnapped earlier. They had a bottle of water and some stale biscuits and cheese to eat.
The remains of four other girls were quickly found. Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, both eight, had starved to death while Dutroux served a jail sentence for car theft. His wife has admitted she knew the girls were locked up below the house, but was "afraid" to enter the dungeon.
Their emaciated bodies, still chained together, were buried in a dustbin liner. Nearby was another body - that of Bernard Weinstein, Dutroux's long-time French "business associate", who, he told the police, he killed for allowing the girls to die. In the garden of Weinstein's home, in the neighbouring town of Jumet, were discovered the corpses of An Marchal and her best friend, Eefje Lambrechts. Both had been kidnapped in 1995 while on a camping holiday in Ostend.
In August 1996, 300,000 people, dressed in white, marched silently through Brussels in honour of the victims, and to protest at the abject failure of the state apparatus to protect them. The government was forced to make an official apology, but farce was to follow tragedy when, in 1998, Dutroux briefly escaped from custody by knocking out a guard and hijacking a passing car.
Despite the biggest judicial investigation in the nation's history, almost no one in Belgium believes the full story of Dutroux's activities will ever be known. The trial is expected to last three months. "I will be very glad when it is over," sighs Martine Van Praet, "and I can return to my normal life." In the meantime she has been offered accommodation in a disused barracks.