- Child rapist Marc Dutroux said he was the hapless fall-guy
for a shadowy paedophile gang as, for the first time, he gave graphic evidence
at a trial that has Belgium in its lurid grip.
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- On the third day of Belgium's "trial of the century",
Dutroux addressed the court from behind bullet-proof glass to claim that
two police officers were part of a sinister network that kidnapped and
raped girls to order.
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- He recounted what he claimed was only a limited role
in the horrifying series of events that led to the discoveries of the bodies
of four girls and the rescue of two others in the summer of 1996.
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- The jobless electrician tried to pin most of the blame
on his estranged wife and two accomplices who are also standing trial in
Arlon, and on a murdered associate, Bernard Weinstein.
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- Dutroux's wife, Michelle Martin, demolished his denials,
but confessed to letting two eight-year-old girls -- Julie Lejeune and
Melissa Russo -- starve to death.
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- Dutroux lost his composure only once during his three-hour
testimony, when asked by the presiding judge, Stephane Goux, to sum up
how he felt about those events.
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- "I made mistakes, I even committed some crimes.
If we could go back to before... but we can't," Dutroux, who faces
life in jail on multiple counts of rape, abduction and murder, said through
a microphone to the electrified court.
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- By his own admission, Dutroux turned a secret cellar
in one of his homes into a charnel house of sexual depravity, where young
girls were forced to submit to unspeakable acts.
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- But the man the Belgian press has dubbed the "monster
of Charleroi" denied murder, or any role in the kidnapping of the
two eight-year-old girls whose horrible end sickened not only Belgians
but the world at large.
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- His claims provoked outrage from lawyers representing
the victims and the businessman on trial, Michel Nihoul, who in Dutroux's
version emerges as the leader of a gang intent on procuring girls for rape.
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- Nihoul angrily denied charges of kidnapping, and when
her turn came to speak, Dutroux's wife tried to take his case apart.
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- Martin, who was convicted in 1989 of helping Dutroux
to kidnap girls for rape, faces 10 years to life in jail if found guilty
in the Arlon trial.
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- She claimed to have first heard of Julie and Melissa's
disappearance on the radio. "He (Dutroux) told me: 'It was Bernard
and me'," she told the court.
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- She also accused Dutroux of murdering two other young
women whom he admits to kidnapping, An Marchal (17) and Eefje Lambrecks
(19). Their bodies were found shortly after the discovery of the corpses
of Julie and Melissa.
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- "Bernard and me, we had to get rid of them because
it was madness, we couldn't get out of it," she quoted her husband
as telling her.
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- The former school teacher, her voice turning emotional,
acknowledged that she failed to follow Dutroux's orders to feed Julie and
Melissa while he was imprisoned for car theft from December 1995 to March
1996.
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- "I couldn't stand this reality. I didn't imagine
that little girls were inside (the house). For me, it was like wild animals
would come to attack me," Martin said.
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- She added that she wished the parents of the victims
and two girls who were rescued from Dutroux's clutches "can hear that
I infinitely regret what happened".
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- Dutroux, in contrast, had no apologies to make.
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- He claimed he had to protect Julie and Melissa from Nihoul,
but had to offer two other girls in return -- hence the abduction of An
and Eefje.
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- He said he was helped in the kidnapping of An and Eefje
by a drug-addict friend, who is also on trial in Arlon, and two other men
who he later discovered were police officers.
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- But he denied killing An and Eefje, saying he had left
them with Weinstein and Michel Lelievre, a heroin-addict friend of Dutroux
and co-defendant in the trial, who in his words planned to force the young
women into prostitution.
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- "I never thought that they were going to kill them,"
he told the court. "I find it a great shame that these girls died.
It's a disaster."
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- The trial is expected to last at least two months.
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- http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040303/1/3ihst.html
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