Satanic occultists at top rungs of society in Belgium/U.S./Canada: Pickton, Bernardo,Dutroux

[causeway...@hotmail.com]

Rich & powerful occult behind spate of missing/dead children

It is my opinion that satanic cult activity is
far more prevalent than is readily accepted by the general public or
reported by the media, and that this perception is due to a concerted
effort by the rich and
powerful occult from the highest political and social and economic
strata of
western society to conceal their activities from the public.
>From the Pickton murders in B.C., to the Bernardo genre killings in
Ontario, the numbers
are larger than the public knows, and usually blamed on a fall guy , a
'serial killer' , when
the bodies are linked to a common location. It is my opinion that
'procurers' and 'caretakers' in organized crime take the fall for the
wealthy cultists whom they supply with fresh victims.

I have been researching the Paul Bernardo murders and found evidence
that Bernardo was a secret member of the Freemasons, a highly
secretive organization
. The link to that information:
http://freemasonrywatch.org/paulbernardo.html

There were occult and satanic aspects to the Bernardo killings (and a
large number of 'unsolved'
oddly similar crimes in the area at that time period. ) Very few
people know of the satanic killings and videotapings in Belgium that
were pinned on one man and his accomplice. The reality has emerged
that Dutroux and his network (mafia) procured (for the wealthy) young
girls for use buy wealthy customers in child prostitution, child porn,
rape porn, and satanic ritual sacrifice. There is proof that many
Belgian girls were murdered by groups of people in Belgium, that they
paid large sums to be provided girls, and that these murders were not
committed by 'lone nuts' as is the common explanation worldwide.
Details of that case (Belgium) follow later in this piece.

I will begin with Bernardo, because many people in Canada have also
been kept unaware
of the satanic aspects to the Bernardo murders and the eery similarity
of the Bernardo and Pickton cases in Canada with the circumstances and
facts of the Belgian murders.

There are satanic aspects to the Bernardo killings that remain largely
unknown.
For example, Leslie Mahaffy was abducted the evening of the day that
she attended a funeral wake for four high school friends who had burned
alive in a car crash on 1st side road in
Burlington. Her body was buried in a cemetery bordering 1st side road.
Kristen French was then abducted in a city far away, St. Catharines.
murdered, and her body transported all the way from the City of St.
Catherines, through the City of Hamilton, and then left in a ditch in
the City of Burlington, a ditch on 1st side road, right exactly beside
the cemetery where Mahaffy was buried, and not far from where the teens

had burned alive in the crash. People connected to the deaths have
been 'suicided', including the father of one of the teens who died in
the fiery crash, and including Johnathon Yeo, who allegedly committed
suicide in police custody after being pursued to a mall parking lot and

cornered by police. (Yeo was the chief suspect in a pair of killings
that have at times been linked to Bernardo, incuding the murder of teen

Laurie Anderson )
Numerous articles and books have mentioned that a far larger series of
similar murders (location, M,O., time period, victim type etc.) have
oddly not been included in the official investigations and records of
the Bernardo killings. It has come out that police had enough evidence

to arrest Bernardo long before Karla Homolka turned him in, and some
speculate that Bernardo received some level of police protection during

the investigations.

Is all of this the work of one person? Or was Paul Bernardo the fall
guy, the patsy who took the rap in the coverup for a far larger group
of people and far more numerous series of crimes?
Why was Homolka able to bargain her way out of dangerous offender
status? What does she know about the true nature of the videotapes and
Bernardo's plans and potentially the others involved? Others with the
power to influence police investigations, silence witnesses, Why the
Corrections Canada media ban on Paul Bernardo, that prevents him from
being interviewed by media and remains in effect to this day? Just
what is it that is being kept quiet here? Paul Bernardo was a master
Freemason (http://freemasonrywatch.org/paulbernardo.html) and it
appears that membership in this secret society, and pedophilia, may run
in the
Bernardo family. Paul's grandfather was an Italian stone mason and
expert craftsman specializing in marble stone work and marble tiling.
Paul's father was a convicted pedophile and peeping tom
who also had sex with Paul's sister.

I have begun to look into a series of crimes that are remarkably
similar to the Bernardo
killings, which occurred in Belgium during the exact time period .
In this case, a married man (Dutroux) was caught with two female
teenaged sex
slaves caged in his basement and the bodies of four other victims
buried concealed beneath his property.

His wife was charged as an accessory to the murders. Like Dutroux,
Bernardo was married, and assisted by his wife in the killings, and.
like Dutroux,
buried the body of one of his victims beneath his garage floor.
The police also found videos of rapes at the Belgian man's home,
exactly as had been the case with Bernardo. Bernardo had intended to
sell these tapes, and he had made them exactly the
same year as these tapes had been made in Belgium . Bernardo made
these rape tapes with the intention of selling them, so he probably
already had a buyer in mind. (the same buyers
who had made Dutroux wealthy over the preceding decade ?)
In the course of the Belgian trial it was disclosed that the
unemployed, uneducated Dutroux had for ten years had an undisclosed
source of lucrative income, and in fact owned a nice house and owned
several properties, including six or seven houses.

What is alarming is that emerging evidence reveals the source of his
income to be involvement in a wide-scale child prostitution/sex slave
ring, sadistic child pornography videos, including torture and rape,
and incredibly, satanic child-sacrifice. All of these services
provided to the wealthy occult upper crust of Belgium and Europe.
Dutroux was occult, and Dutroux was mafia. Dutroux had accomplices, and

customers.
Was this Bernardo's secret too? It is possible that the exact same
pattern
was and is occcurring in Canada, and that Bernardo was just a small
part of
the picture. How many tapes were really made and sold? How many women
abducted and sold?

In Belgium, the coverup of this ring has reached to the highest
echelons of Belgian
society. Politicians and witnesses have died for threatening to expose
the full extent of the sect, and the powerful, famous
and rich people involved. The Belgian secret service has gunned down
witnesses
in grocery stores , such are the stakes in this case.

This has wider-reaching implications for western society in general,
when one notes the secrecy that money can buy, and when one sees such
similarity of circumstances as such that surround the Bernardo case.
Botched investigations, lost evidence, secret deals, and of course
Bernardo's largely concealed connection to secret societies. Do we
really know the full Bernardo story?
Do we know the truth about occult activity in Canada? In North America?

Please read and enjoy the following information about what occurred in
Belgium
less than ten years ago.
, be warned that it is
graphic.

Defence raise satanic cult
03/03/2004 09:19 - (SA)

Dutroux trial told of depravity

Media frenzy in Dutroux trial

Lawyers blast 'monster' label

'Most-hated man' goes on trial

Arlon - Lawyers for alleged Belgian child killer Marc Dutroux on
Tuesday evoked satanic cults, unreliable or missing witnesses and
troubling forensic evidence in their defence of the serial rapist.

Presenting a nine-page written statement at the trial in Arlon,
southeast Belgium, Dutroux's lead lawyer Xavier Magnee insisted that
his client could not have acted alone in the abductions, rape and
murders of several girls.

"Can people make you believe that there wasn't a paedophile ring? Would

we be the only country in the world where paedophiles are isolated
perverts?" Magnee told the court on the second day of hearings in the
long-awaited trial.

He said police forensic analysis had found traces of DNA from "a least
two or three unknown people" in the dungeon-like cellar at Marcinelle,
near the southern town of Charleroi, where Dutroux allegedly held six
girls captive.

Four of the girls died, and two were rescued, in a sequence of
discoveries in August 1996 that traumatised Belgium.

Opinion polls suggest that nearly 70% of Belgians are convinced that
Dutroux was part of a broader paedophile network than the four people
on trial in Arlon - Dutroux himself, his wife, a drug-addict friend and

a businessman.

"We see clearly in the (prosecution) dossier material proof that other
people than the accused here present frequented the cellar at
Marcinelle at the same time as the victims," Magnee said.

"The jury is only being presented with selected slices of the case."

Satanic cult

The lawyer also returned to an allegation - dismissed by prosecutors as

groundless - that a satanic cult was involved in the girls' abductions.

Police in August 1996 found a note at the home of Bernard Weinstein, an

accomplice who Dutroux has admitted murdering, which led them to
investigate the "Abrasax" organisation led by "high priestess"
Dominique Kindermans.

The Belgian press at the time speculated that the organisation was a
devil-worshipping sect that procured young girls for human sacrifices
at black masses.

Police, however, dismissed the apparent lead and said there was no
evidence against Kindermans to warrant such allegations.

The defence team also urged the court to consider the disappearance, in

sometimes violent or suspicious circumstances, of several witnesses
they said could shed better light on the fate of two eight-year-old
girls who allegedly starved to death in Dutroux's dungeon.

De Morgen, 8 January 1998
THE GIRL WHO GAVE BIRTH IN SECRET
by Annemie Bulté and Douglas de Coninck

The body of Carine Dellaert was found on 24 September 1985 in a septic
tank in Ghent. According to XI, the young girl had lived secretly
inside a network for a year after her disappearance. The autopsy report

and the investigation carried out at the time confirm XI's story on
several crucial points. The old investigation has been reopened, but
how long it will stay open is still uncertain.

Early in the morning a workman drove his bulldozer into the backyard of

"Le Neptune", an old café once frequented by sailors. The café,
situated along the Ghent-Terneuzen canal, had been abandoned for years
and was to be demolished that day, 24 September 1985. The work had just

begun when the workman lost control of the vehicle. The back wheel sank

into a hole by the side of the old toilets. When some Rhône-Poulenc
workers rushed over to help to right the bulldozer, the lid of the tank

caved in. They scrutinised the bottom out of curiosity. "We saw
something float to the surface," one of them recalls. "It was a knee."
A few hours later, Quai Kuhlman was swarming with nervous policemen.
The remains of an unidentified young girl had been found in the tank.
The body was in foetal position, bound with white electric wire, the
feet and hands tied. "The body was in a very advanced state of
decomposition," says another policeman. "We had to take the skeleton to

the lab in fragments." Not much remained of the young girl's clothes.
A gold ankle chain and a pearl necklace had been preserved. The
jewellery set off a signal in the mind of the Ghent deputy public
prosecutor Nicole De Rouck. She thought immediately of Carine Dellaert.

It was a strange case. She had disappeared on 30 August 1982.
Unexpectedly. Her older sister was ill in bed, her brother was playing
in the street, her mother was at work. Her father, Emile Dellaert, had
left home at 2 p.m. When her mother got home, Carine had left. There
was no trace of a struggle, no farewell letters. Nothing. A week went
by before Emile Dellaert reported his daughter as missing, on 7 ...

[causeway...@hotmail.com]

continued:

7 September. This is why he was immediately regarded as a suspect.
Hardly
any searches were made. The child protection unit of the public
prosecutor's department followed the most plausible hypothesis, that
Carine had run away due to conflict in the family . For there had been
conflict. Her parents would get divorced soon after. In December 1983,
the Ghent investigating magistrate Pieters opened a criminal
investigation against Emile Dellaert. He was arrested and spent two
months in prison. In January 1986, he was released through lack of
evidence. In 1989 he was considered free of all suspicion. The file was

closed.

XI recognises Clo, her best friend.

At the end of 1996, some strange things went on in the financial
section (3rd Criminal Research Section) of the Brussels BSR.
Investigators from the Neufchâteau unit questioned witnesses until
late into the night. Occasionally the officers saw their colleagues
leave the room pale-faced.

The main cause of the trouble was witness XI. The young woman claimed
to have been the victim of a network that raped, tortured and killed
children in the seventies and eighties. "Many girls, like myself, never

knew anything different," she explained. "We grew up with it. We lived
in a sort of concentration camp." XI rejected the term
'paedophiles'. "The men who raped us weren't particularly
attracted by children. The only thing they were interested in was to go

beyond all limits from a sexual point of view. And children were
perfect for that. They kept quiet and did what was asked of them."

One of the girls XI got to know in the network was Clo. XI mentioned
her name during the first session of questioning, on 20 September 1996.

Clo, she explained, was no older than herself and also came from Ghent.

She was her best friend and comfort in this secret world. Just like XI,

Clo led a double life. She went to school normally, and couldn't
speak to anyone about the places she was taken to during the weekends.
XI met Clo regularly during orgies in Ghent and sometimes in Brussels.
XI couldn't say much more about Clo, except the name of her school.

During the fourth session of questioning, on 25 October, XI recounted
that the young girl had died thirteen years ago. XI gave a detailed
description of a scene she would have preferred to forget, but that
will mark her for the rest of her days. She situated the events between

June and December 1983. Clo was very heavily pregnant, she stated. XI
met her from time to time at a "party", but always at a certain
distance. None of the girls could have any contact with her.

On 25 October, in statement no. 116.018, XI said: "One day my procurer
came for me and blindfolded me to take me to a house near Ghent. There
were three other people in the house (XI gave the names of her
procurer, T.; a lawyer from Brussels and a Flemish burgomaster). T.
left me in a room where Clo was lying on a bed in the middle of labour.

I had to help her to give birth. She was bleeding a lot and suffering
terribly. I panicked because I was alone with no-one to help me. The
baby was only born a few hours later. It was a boy. I cut the umbilical

cord and placed the baby on Clo's belly. At that moment, T. returned
to the room and took the baby, while I stayed with Clo. She was losing
a lot of blood."

XI can only guess what happened then to Clo, because she had to leave
the house. Some men who had been in the back of the house all evening
took her to a Chinese restaurant in Bruges. XI thinks that her friend
died in her arms but she cannot be sure that she didn't live a little
longer and that the horrific scene did not continue.

Thanks to research carried out at "Clo's" school, the BSR
investigators managed to guess who she was. After that, BSR officers
Patrick De Baets and Philippe Hupez showed XI a series of class photos
from the year 1981-82. XI not only pointed to the photos of Carine
Dellaert, but also to another photo. According to XI, it was V. (she
gave her first name). She added: "They killed her, too. Clo told me
that she was called V."

During questioning on 25 October, statement no. 116.018, XI said: "This

happened in a house in Ghent. Clo was there, too [...] They tortured
her with knives and scissors. Someone broke a bottle and rubbed the
fragments into her vagina. Then they cut her in various places with
razor-blades."

After this session of questioning, they no longer knew where they were
at the 3rd Criminal Research Section. From a series of twenty photos,
XI had managed to pick out two girls who had died shortly afterwards.
After further research, the investigators not only came across the old
file on the murder of Carine Dellaert, but also information concerning
the second young girl. She was, in fact, called V., and had died in the

middle of 1983 in Ghent. As regards the list of people present
according to XI, some of the details were remarkable. As well as Michel

Nihoul and a woman who was arrested in the Dutroux case, XI named her
procurer T., the lawyer and the burgomaster mentioned above, and a
businessman from western Flanders and his son. XI could not establish
any links between all these people, except the fact that she had met
them on various occasions at orgies. The investigators carried out
research which showed that all the people present had professional
links of one sort or another, links that were not apparent at first
sight. The name of the man she indicated as Clo's "procurer" was also
remarkable. He had already appeared as a suspect in the old file at the

Ghent Public prosecutor's department. The man was known to the police
for a series of sexual crimes.

The Timperman report

When politicians today make comments and observations about the split
between "believers" and "non-believers", they are reviving a debate
that was born at the end of October 1996 within the 3rd Criminal
Research Section. XI's story triggered reactions that were far from
being rational. The public prosecutor Michel Bourlet invited the
investigators not to stop at the matter of whether they believed the
story or not, but to carry out their work in an objective manner.
According XI's statement, it seemed that Carine Dellaert had lived
one year after her disappearance, pregnant and hidden away. This must
be provable in one way or another. One detail is disturbing. Carine
Dellaert disappeared the day before the end of the school holidays in
1982. To "place" a girl in a network, this seems to be an ideal time.

If the search for the murderers of Carine Dellaert didn't lead to
very much at the time, it certainly wasn't because of Dr. Timperman.
In his 40-page autopsy report, he listed all the details of his
findings regarding the remains of the body. He was unable, due to the
state of the body, to estimate the date of death. One of the details he

noted initially caused some doubts about the identity of the victim.
The girl in the tank was much heavier than Carine Dellaert. She was
wearing a 90 cm. cup bra - a few sizes bigger than Carine. Dr.
Timperman found an explanation for this anomaly. The following extract
is taken from his report of 24 September 1985:

"At the level of the pelvis there is a small piece of soft, woody
tissue. It is a piece of "crayon laminaire", an old medical instrument
used to dilate the neck of the womb in order to facilitate the delivery

of a baby. This instrument is now rarely used because it causes great
pain for the mother."
"Presence in the bra of a small square of gauze, which indicates a
swelling of the breasts and a loss of liquid. This is frequent in women

who are pregnant for the first time."
Everything pointed to the fact that the young girl lived another eight
or nine months after her disappearance. Timperman also described the
objects found in the tank. There were a total of nineteen objects,
mainly coins and pieces of jewellery. But there were also:

"Two Gillette razor-blades."
When the BSR officers received the Timperman report at the end of 1996,

they immediately analysed what the press had written on the subject of
the discovery of the body of Carine Dellaert in 1985. Not a word about
her pregnancy. Not even in the shortest paragraph after Carine's
disappearance in 1982. No-one had mentioned a pregnancy.

XI had spoken of razor-blades in her testimony about V., but not on the

subject of Carine Dellaert. It is worth pointing out that long before
the Timperman report landed at the 3rd Criminal Research Section, XI
had described other sadistic scenes in which razor-blades were
mentioned as the customary modus operandi. "For some of them, it was
clearly their favourite toy."

The death of V.

XI also described a series of addresses where she and Clo had been
raped at the beginning of the eighties. On 29 September 1996, during
the second of her seventeen hearings, she described a bar in
Drongensesteenweg, very near the home of the Dellaert family. The bar
no longer exists. The investigators found a list of the owners. Later,
XI named a house in Waarschot as the place where Clo died. Nothing
indicates that fifteen years later a firm occupies this address.
Whether it is a coincidence or not, among the partners is the name of
one of the owners of the bar in Drongensesteenweg.

At the end of 1996, the Dellaert file was reopened by the public
prosecutor's department of Ghent. Meanwhile the death certificate of
V., the second girl, had been found. It states that the girl died as
the result of a tumour. The C3 form was filled in by two neurologists
accused by XI of being part of the network. While watching T., XI's
procurer, the investigators noticed that he is in contact with the
father of V.

On 28 October 1996, the investigators applied for authorisation to
exhume the body of V. This authorisation would never be given. At the
beginning of the summer holidays, the public prosecutor's department
of Ghent received some news from Brussels. Investigating magistrate Van

Espen and Gendarmerie Commander Duterme had expressed serious doubts
about the manner in which XI had been questioned. The Ghent public
prosecutor Soenens was informed of the matter, and launched an appeal
for calm. He wanted to see the credibility of XI confirmed, for example

through the further development of the Van Hees case. The wait began.
The Ghent public prosecutor's department transferred the case to the
Ghent BSR, but two camps quickly formed there and the rumours about XI
began to fly. The announcement of the article in De Morgen caused a
stir within the Ghent public prosecutor's department. Public
Prosecutor Soenens has assured us that "the investigation duties have
been drawn up" and that for the end of January a "co-ordination meeting

is planned" for all the public prosecutor's departments where
inquiries have been opened on the basis of the testimony of XI.

THE CREDIBILITY OF JUSTICE
Marc Reisinger

The day when Sabine and Laetitia were liberated will undoubtedly remain

a turning point in the history of Belgium. Before then, children
disappeared, their bodies were found, and occasionally a murderous
sadist was arrested. This took up a few lines in the "news in brief"
columns. It was as if we were seeing a few fixed frames of a horror
film so far from our daily life that we no longer paid them much
attention. Suddenly, on 15 August 1996, we witnessed the liberation in
real time of two young girls abducted and locked up by Marc Dutroux.
The emotion I felt that day as I watched the TV was shared by millions
of people in Belgium and all over the world. It was at the origin of
the "marche blanche", which itself led for the first time to the live
TV broadcast of the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the
disappearance of children. I am not surprised today to discover in the
testimony of Regina - known as XI - the importance that the
liberation of Sabine and Laetitia had for her: "The policemen who
escorted Sabine and Laetitia into a car were the white knights I had
dreamed of throughout those years" (De Morgen, 10 January 1998). It was

at that moment that she decided to testify in Neufchâteau.

But the arrest of Dutroux and Nihoul also marked the appearance of a
split between the "sensitive" and the "insensitive". Most people felt
total empathy for the children who were victims of cruelty. However, a
certain number of strong spirits immediately began to criticise
Connerotte and Bourlet, the Neufchâteau "cowboys". The removal of
magistrate Connerotte was applauded by the conservative establishment,
but also by a certain number of left-wing intellectuals. For reasons
that we would have to analyse, the latter distrusted the emotion and
the excessive media attention surrounding the case. As a
psychotherapist, I fear that these people feel difficulty entering into

contact with their own suffering, and that they thus take sides
unconsciously with the aggressors. It is also likely that hidden
influence was set into motion by figures who, rightly or wrongly, felt
compromised by the disclosures. How many people who simply took part in

Nihoul's orgies tremble in fear that their names will be cited?
Regina stated in her testimony that some of the "parties" of the
network were organised with the aim of blackmailing.

A further split gradually appeared in the media. Most of the press
began to describe Dutroux as a lone wolf, a psychopath, demented and
brilliant. Nihoul was painted as a businessman and a swindler who had
recently met Dutroux and had had the unfortunate idea to have his car
repaired by him. This thesis was the object of a press campaign that
culminated in the TV programme "Au Nom de la Loi" (RTBF, 17 September
1997). Immediately afterwards, a "campaign of silence" developed around

Nihoul: his name hardly appeared in the francophone press - with the
exception of Télé Moustique - in the following six months.

It is to react to all this that we have created the "Pour la vérité"
association, made up of people of various backgrounds anxious to
preserve their critical spirit in the face of a premature attempt to
dismiss claims that Dutroux and Nihoul had known each other for a long
time and that Nihoul benefits from protection. We formulated twelve
questions with regard to the investigations in progress and we
purchased an entire page in Le Soir to publish them under the title
"Nous ne laisserons pas passer". Our aim was to address a message to
the public and to try to wake up the media. We have had little success
on the second point.

The campaign of silence was finally broken only by the publication of
the testimony of Regina. For more than six months, she gave evidence in

Neufchâteau about the network of which Dutroux and Nihoul were
members. Her testimony describes very clearly the murder of young girls

and children. According to the BSR (Brigade Speciale de Recherche) team

which heard it, this testimony should have led to fresh inquiries and,
in particular, to further searches. Instead, the team was removed from
the investigation in July 1997. Since then, a "re-examination" of the
file has been taking place. This re-examination, accompanied by the
suspension of the investigation, constitutes a new development in
judicial procedure. It is as if a doctor stopped treating a patient in
a critical condition in order to calmly re-read the medical records.
When we realise that this re-examination has already lasted longer than

the investigation and that its end is postponed every time the date of
the conclusion of the parliamentary committee of inquiry is put back,
we might fear that the re-examination actually serves to hush up the
investigation.

The unconfessed desire to halt the investigation seems evident to a
careful observer. This desire is disguised behind the "scandal" of the
leaks. The public prosecutor's department and certain sectors of the
media are disturbed by the leaks without being disturbed by their
contents, while organising further leaks that call into question the
testimony of XI (like the publication of a summary of the
re-examination and of extracts of the psychiatric report on XI). The
discussion of the contents of the testimony of XI has also been avoided

by focussing the media debate on her credibility: is she traumatised,
mad, or suffering from mythomania?

It seems to me to be more interesting to question the credibility of
justice than that of XI. Rather than turning to psychiatrists to find
out whether what Regina says is true, it would be better to attend to
the precise facts described and continue the investigations. We know,
for example, that Regina gave details about the murders of Christine
Van Hees and Carine Dellaert that match the file and sometimes surpass
it in terms of accuracy (like the nail hammered into Christine's
hand). She also named as a victim a young girl from Ghent, Véronique
D., who officially died of cancer. This is a perfect opportunity to
find out whether XI is reliable: the medical records should be
analysed, the two doctors who signed the death certificate should be
questioned and the body exhumed. These evident duties of the
investigation have been requested by the investigators since January
1997, but up to now they have been rejected by the public
prosecutor's department in Ghent.

Should we not begin to give serious consideration to a different
hypothesis from XI's lack of credibility to explain the delay in
inquiries? Is it not simply the fact that her testimony calls into
question important figures such as industrialists, politicians, and
even a former prime minister?

A promising indication of the Satanic conspiracy could be found in
Belgium last year, when links between a series of grisly pædophile
killings and an active Satanist society shocked the nation. Throughout
the summer, the gradual revelations of the murders of at least four
children led to the arrest of Marc Dutroux, an unemployed electrician
and convicted paedophile, his wife Michele Martin and other
accomplices. They are suspected of other pædophile killings around the

city of Charleroi but, so far, no other bodies have been found. Two
attempts - in November 1996 and January 1997 - to drain and search
abandoned mine shafts in the suburb of Jumet proved equally fruitless,
despite separate suggestions by Dutroux and his wife that police would
do well to look there.

The presence of a Satanic conspiracy became a distinct possibility
when, in mid-December, while investigating the Dutroux's pædophile
network, Belgian police stumbled upon links to a college of Black Magic

called the Institut Abrasax, in a village near Charleroi. The building
served as the offices of a number of pagan organisations, including the

Belgian Church of Satan and the Luciferian Initiation Order. According
to Peter Conradi, reporting for the Times, "five witnesses described
black masses [there] at which children were killed in front of
audiences said to have included prominent members of Belgian society."

In early January 1997, a Flemish newspaper disclosed that three
policemen (and possibly a fourth) of the Charleroi municipal force had
admitted to being members of Abrasax, claiming it was all quite
harmless. Mindful of the allegations that some babies were sold to the
group by their parents while others were abducted, more than 100
investigators searched the building for eight hours. As well as the
expected ritual paraphernalia, police found a bottle of frozen blood in

a refrigerator. High priestess Dominique Kindermans - who described
the search as terrifying - managed to prove she bought the blood from
a butcher.

To make matters worse, police also uncovered evidence of a separate
locus of orgies in a dilapidated chateau. Organised by Michel Nihoul, a

known accomplice of Dutroux, a group of judges, senior politicians,
lawyers and policemen have been implicated in the orgies there. This
too, panned out; just sleaze as usual. To the dispair of the
witch-hunters, so far the associations have proved circumstantial, the
allegations have remained unproven and there have been no further
arrests.

Article Info
'The Devil Worshipers' by Bob Rickard

May 1997

FT 98A promising indication of the Satanic conspiracy could be found in

Belgium last year, when links between a series of grisly pædophile
killings and an active Satanist society shocked the nation. Throughout
the summer, the gradual revelations of the murders of at least four
children led to the arrest of Marc Dutroux, an unemployed electrician
and convicted paedophile, his wife Michele Martin and other
accomplices. They are suspected of other pædophile killings around the

city of Charleroi but, so far, no other bodies have been found. Two
attempts - in November 1996 and January 1997 - to drain and search
abandoned mine shafts in the suburb of Jumet proved equally fruitless,
despite separate suggestions by Dutroux and his wife that police would
do well to look there.

The presence of a Satanic conspiracy became a distinct possibility
when, in mid-December, while investigating the Dutroux's pædophile
network, Belgian police stumbled upon links to a college of Black Magic

called the Institut Abrasax, in a village near Charleroi. The building
served as the offices of a number of pagan organisations, including the

Belgian Church of Satan and the Luciferian Initiation Order. According
to Peter Conradi, reporting for the Times, "five witnesses described
black masses [there] at which children were killed in front of
audiences said to have included prominent members of Belgian society."

In early January 1997, a Flemish newspaper disclosed that three
policemen (and possibly a fourth) of the Charleroi municipal force had
admitted to being members of Abrasax, claiming it was all quite
harmless. Mindful of the allegations that some babies were sold to the
group by their parents while others were abducted, more than 100
investigators searched the building for eight hours. As well as the
expected ritual paraphernalia, police found a bottle of frozen blood in

a refrigerator. High priestess Dominique Kindermans - who described
the search as terrifying - managed to prove she bought the blood from
a butcher.

To make matters worse, police also uncovered evidence of a separate
locus of orgies in a dilapidated chateau. Organised by Michel Nihoul, a

known accomplice of Dutroux, a group of judges, senior politicians,
lawyers and policemen have been implicated in the orgies there. This
too, panned out; just sleaze as usual. To the dispair of the
witch-hunters, so far the associations have proved circumstantial, the
allegations have remained unproven and there have been no further
arrests.

Article Info
'The Devil Worshipers' by Bob Rickard

De Morgen, 7 January 1997
DUTROUX AND NIHOUL SUSPECTED OF THE MURDER OF CHRISTINE VAN HEES IN
1984
By Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck

On 13 February 1984, the horribly mutilated body of 16-year-old
Christine Van Hees was found in an old Champignonnière (mushroom bed)
in Auderghem. Thirteen years of investigations led to nothing. Three
months before the beginning of the Dutroux case, the Brussels public
prosecutor's department classified the case as closed. At the end of
1996, witness XI testified to the Neufchâteau public prosecutor's
department, accusing Marc Dutroux, Michel Nihoul and others of having
committed the murder. Thanks to extremely precise information, XI
proved that she was present at the time of the murder. Despite this,
the investigation is now completely blocked.

Since 27 January 1997, the Brussels public prosecutor's department
has been leading an investigation into the alleged involvement of Marc
Dutroux and Michel Nihoul in the murder of the young Christine Van
Hees. The work of the Neufchâteau unit (3rd Section of Criminal
Research, Brussels BSR) led to the reopening of the 13-year-old
investigation. The first reason was the statements of witness XI. The
28-year-old women contacted the magistrate Jean-Marc Connerotte in
Neufchâteau on 4 September 1996. XI stated that she was present at the

time of the murder. She was able to prove this by a precise description

of the places, details of the injuries inflicted on Christine Van Hees,

and information regarding the private life of the victims and the
accused. In some respects XI's statement proved to be more complete
than the autopsy report made by the forensic surgeons.

XI's version was confirmed after an analysis of the old investigation
file. This investigation, led from 1985 onwards by the Brussels
magistrate Van Espen, already contained evidence pointing to Dutroux
and Nihoul. In 1984 a friend of Christine Van Hees stated to the
Brussels CID that the young girl, during the weekend preceding her
death, had a rendez-vous with "a certain Marc in the region of Mons".
At the end of 1996, it appeared that Dutroux frequented the same
ice-skating rink as Christine Van Hees in 1983 and 1984. Moreover, it
turned out that not long before her death the young girl went to a
party held by the free radio station in Etterbeek, Radio Activité, run

at the time by Michel Nihoul.

In the course of the new investigation, around 300 witnesses were
questioned. These confirmed the statements of XI on a number of crucial

points. And yet the investigation has now come to a halt. On 25 August
1997, the team of investigators following up XI's statements was
removed. This happened on the insistence of magistrate Van Espen, who
had doubts about the objectivity of the investigators. On the request
of Van Espen, his colleague Langlois (Neufchâteau) and police
commander Duterme, a "re-examination" of all the inquiries based on the

testimony of XI was begun. Initially this re-examination was to last a
few weeks, but it has dragged on for over six months. Since September,
XI has had to deal with a new group of investigators. In a letter
addressed to the Verwilghen Committee, she complains - like her
therapist - of the manner in which she is treated. XI says that she
feels they want to "break" her emotionally.

It is not only the Van Hees investigation that has nearly come to a
halt. The same is true of five other inquiries which were opened (or
reopened) on the basis of the statements of XI to the public
prosecutor's departments of Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and
Neufchâteau. XI describes many murders of children which she says were

carried out in the context of a very extensive network of child
prostitution. Despite a triple "re-examination" of XI's statements,
it cannot be demonstrated that this information can have any source
other than her own memory.

The information published by De Morgen with regard to these inquiries
are the result of five months of research.

Dutroux and Nihoul suspected of the murder of Christine Van Hees in
1984

"It's the nail in my coffin," stated the Brussels magistrate
Jean-Claude Van Espen when asked about the Champignonnière file. The
expression was not a particularly happy one. At the end of 1996, it was

because of a nail that the officers of the Brussels BSR probably found
the key to the mystery that surrounds the horrific murder of Christine
Van Hees in 1984. Very soon it also turned out that even without the
Dutroux affair and the testimony of XI Van Espen would have been able
to find the trail of Marc Dutroux and Michel Nihoul as early as 1985.

That evening, the fireman Norbert Vanden Berghen experienced the most
dramatic moments in his professional life. "The phone had not stopped
ringing all day. We had had a lot of fires and accidents, even three at

a time." The date was Monday 13 February 1984. At 8.47 p.m. another
emergency call came. A cloud of smoke had been seen in a ruined family
mansion on the land of the old Auderghem Champignonnière, near the
campus of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). Before the fireman
reached the scene, a second fire was reported nearby. Smoke was coming
from the basement window of the Champignonnière. While one team
searched the abandoned house, the other team plunged into the cellar
with torches. Lieutenant Vanden Berghen was part of the second team.
"We saw a fire smouldering under a pile of wooden boxes. As the fire
had almost gone out, we looked inside."

Cause of death unknown.

What then appeared will remain impressed on the fireman's mind for a
long time. He saw a charred human trunk. Part of the head had been
devoured by the flames. Feet and hands, there wasn't much left. "It
was a young girl. She was lying on her stomach. She was naked. Her legs

and arms were tied together with a length of wire, which was also
twisted around her neck. Her legs were bent backwards. Horrible."

In the smouldering pile, the experts from the Brussels police found
personal items belonging to the victim: jewels, the charred remains of
a T-shirt, a bra. The detectives were faced with a puzzle. Their first
impression was that the victim had accompanied her murderers
voluntarily. Before the group had gone down into the basement, they had

evidently been in the house, where objects were found that seemed to be

related to the crime.

The next day, when Pierre and Antoinette Van Hees heard the news of the

discovery of the body of a young girl a few blocks from where they
lived, they were overcome by fear. Their 16-year-old daughter Christine

had not come home the day before. Another day and a half passed before
the Brussels CID could give the managers of the newsagent's in Avenue
du Diamant a definite answer: the body was that of Christine. Her
parents had to go and identity bits of exercise books and jewellery.
They were not shown the body. There were reasons for that. In their
autopsy report, the forensic surgeons Rillaert and Voordecker did not
hazard an opinion on the cause of death. Before being burnt, the young
girl had been so badly abused that it was impossible to tell which act
of torture had been fatal. In his first report, Dr. Voordecker
mentioned traces of strangling. Later the doctors included another
observation in their report: the victim was not undergoing menstruation

- a detail which would only assume full importance thirteen years
later. The girl's parents had another shock to endure. Their daughter
had not been to school that morning. Apparently she had missed school
quite often.

It was the period of new wave music. Christine Van Hees was a dreamer.
She loved U2, and in the months before her death she had argued with
her parents more than once about her clothes and her social life.
Christine also loved sport. Once a week she would go skating or
swimming. She went to school in Anderlecht, where she had many friends.

That afternoon, towards 5.20 p.m., she was last seen alive by two of
her friends in Rue Wayez in Anderlecht. She had a bit of a chat with
her friend Chantal and showed her the boots she had bought (or got from

someone) that morning. During this conversation, she noticed Didier,
her old scout chief. Chantal and Didier saw Christine walk towards the
Saint-Guidon underground station. From there it was half an hour's
journey to the Pétillon station, near her home. It must have been very

quick. At 6.50 p.m. some people in Rue de la Stratégie heard a young
girl screaming. What they heard seemed to be: "No, not that! Stop!
Mum!".

The punk trail

Those who were students at the Free University of Brussels in the
mid-eighties knew the urban legend. Some screwy punks had organised a
Satanic mass. The case seemed simple. In 1984 the deserted
Champignionnière was a pile of ruins. Some punks used to go there
regularly to smoke joints, before returning to the Kultuurcafé. To the

extent that he had time for this case, that was the trail followed by
the Brussels investigating magistrate Eloy. Eloy was also in charge of
the investigation into the left-wing C.C.C. terrorist group. A lot for
just one man. Eloy had a heart attack, and later a nervous breakdown.
On 1 October 1985, the case was placed in the hands of another
magistrate, the up-and-coming Jean-Claude Van Espen.

Van Espen inherited a file that already contained a principal suspect:
Serge C., one of the punks who had been seen frequently at the
Champignionnière. C., nicknamed 'l'Iroquois", was a striking
character. A bright red Mohican, military boots, drugged up to his
eyeballs. In 1983, C. had served two months in prison for violent
theft. Later he was prosecuted for desertion. On 13 September 1984 he
was arrested and charged with the murder of Christine Van Hees. During
a search one of her exercise books was found at his house. C. denied,
confessed, denied, confessed... His lawyer attributed the fickleness of

his young client to the fact that the CID rewarded his confessions with

drugs. Without drugs, C. said he knew nothing. There was only one
constant in his statements: he had no idea how the exercise book had
ended up in his room. He suspected someone had put it there "to get
him". C. was heard a total of sixteen times and would remain in custody

for three years, two months and four days. In the psychiatric reports
we read that Serge C. was "heavily mentally deranged" and that "he has
no control over his actions". When C. was released on 17 November 1987
without any further charges, Didier de Quévy became his lawyer. De
Quévy took the case to the European Court of the Human Rights, where
Belgium was condemned in 1991 for keeping C. in custody for an
unreasonable length of time. During this period de Quévy was also
defending other "drop-outs". He was the defence lawyer of a certain
Marc Dutroux from Marcinelle. At the beginning of 1992, the Brussels
CID resumed the investigation into the murder of Christine Van Hees
from the beginning. For the first time, Christine's mother Antoinette
Van Hees was questioned, and a local investigation took place. This led

to a new trail. For four years police searched for the owner of a black

car with a golden eagle on the bonnet. Some local residents had seen
such a car patrolling the area. This trail also led nowhere. In June
1996, Christine's parents learned from the Brussels public
prosecutor's department that the case had been closed. "In their
letter, they wrote your daughter Claudine," recalls Pierre Van Hees.
"To give you an idea of the intensive manner in which they dealt with
the case."

Witness XI comes forward in Neufchâteau

Wednesday 4 September 1996: investigating magistrate Jean-Marc
Connerotte of Neufchâteau was talking to Warrant Officer De Baets of
the 3rd Criminal Research Section of the Brussels BSR. De Baets was
furious. He was leading the investigation into the financial situation
of Marc Dutroux. The telephone rang. A certain "Tania from Ghent" tried

to explain something to Connerotte, but her French was as
incomprehensible to him as his Flemish was to her. He handed the phone
to De Baets. Through Tania, De Baets was put in contact with a young
woman who wanted "to say some things about Michel Nihoul". It quickly
appeared that the young woman had a lot to say. Since she asked to
remain anonymous, she was called XI in the statement.

"We are faced with ruin," said Marc Verwilghen when he heard about the
testimony of XI at the end of 1996. During a TV debate, a journalist
from Le Soir predicted that Belgium would not exist for much longer.
The Dutroux case, he said, was just a detail. Who is XI? A small,
27-year-old woman, surprisingly self-confident, with an incredible
history. As a baby she was entrusted to her grandmother, who lived in
Knokke. There she was raised as a child prostitute. Until the age of
ten, she was handed over like goods for sale in hotel rooms in Knokke.
XI explained that as an adolescent, while watching TV she would
occasionally see those who had raped her. Ministers, burgomasters,
barons, or the managing directors of banks and important companies.
That these men raped her was OK, said XI, that was bearable. The
murders, that was the real problem. The pleasure of these clients was
accentuated by the anguish of the child. Their greatest pleasure
matched the greatest anguish, that of death. According to XI, for the
organisation and the protection of their debauchery, these well-known
figures turned to small-time criminals like her own procurer Tony, or
characters like Marc Dutroux, Michel Nihoul and Bernard Weinstein. What

should they do with a testimony like this at a time when the whole
country was baying? Investigate, ordered Connerotte.

One thing surprised Warrant Officer De Baets from XI's first hearing
on 20 September 1996. She did not hesitate. With disconcerting ease,
she was able to name old classmates who could confirm her story (which
they would do), she gave the secret addresses of well-known figures and

described the inside of their houses (correctly). She spoke of "Marc",
the poor oaf who, at the beginning of the eighties, passed over her
body with others including "Miche". "Dutroux had two alsatians," she
said. "They were called Brutus and Sultan." Later, during police
questioning, Dutroux was asked about his dogs. He got frightened and
refused to answer. Michelle Martin was suspicious. One of the two dogs
was still alive - it guarded the house in Marcinelle when Julie and
Mélissa were imprisoned there. "It was called Sultan," said Martin. A
lot of information about Dutroux was disclosed by the press in those
days. The dog's name was never mentioned. How could XI have known it?

The secret diary

XI would be heard a total of seventeen times. Each of these hearings
was filmed from the first minute to the last. This was done on the
advice of experts. XI suffers from what is known in psychology as
dissociation. In order to remember a traumatic event, she has to look
in a corner of her memory that she has locked up. Speaking about it
makes the victim relive the traumatic event. But XI knows how to
protect herself. When it became too difficult for her, she fell silent
--for hours, if necessary. She never cried. "They never taught me to
express my grief," she apologised.

On the evening of the 13 November, during her fifth hearing, XI
mentioned Christine's name. She told how the young girl, after being
tortured at length, was burned in the basement of a ruined building, in

the Brussels area. This happened in the wake of an orgy that had lasted

a whole weekend, during which - she would add later - her own
5-month-old baby was killed. As a punishment. Among those present, XI
named Michel Nihoul, Marc Dutroux, Michelle Martin, Annie Bouty, Tony,
Bernard Weinstein, a lawyer from Brussels, a couple from Ghent, and a
"stranger".

>From the hearing of 13 November, statement number 116/990: "They killed

Christine [...] Dutroux and Nihoul tied her up in a special way. I had
to plunge a knife into her vagina [...] They told me I had to make her
shut up. Christine was tied up first of all on a table [...]. They
guided my hand, I was forced to strangle her, otherwise the same thing
would happen to me. Christine was raped several times. Then they untied

her, in order to tie her up again. Her feet and hands were tied
together on her back. Then they burned her." At the end of the
questioning, XI described the house where this took place. Later, she
gave further explanations about what had led to the punitive execution:

"In the network, there were some experienced girls, like me, whose
parents had left them at a very early age. There were also girls who
were approached by adults and gradually introduced into the network. We

had to take these girls under our wing. If they committed a mistake, it

was we who were punished. That's the way it worked. With Christine it
didn't work at all. She was lost. Three or four months before her
death, she had met Nihoul. He made all sorts of promises. It was only
at the end that she realised the truth. She wanted to leave, she told
me. She told me that she had a secret diary hidden away somewhere. I
told her to speak to her parents and ask them to protect her. I then
made the stupid mistake of speaking about it with another girl. She had

just received a beating because of Christine and she went to tell
Nihoul about the secret diary. They planned the execution straight
away. She had to die, as an example to the rest of us."

>From the eighth hearing, 18 November 1996, statement number 116/991:

"We were both pushed naked into a car. After a journey of twenty
minutes we came to a place with lots of weeds and rubble. There was a
funny smell, the ground was cold and damp [...] We arrived in a house,
upstairs. Then we went down into a big cellar. There Christine was
untied and tied up again like a rabbit. She was raped again and cut
with a knife. [...] There were some candles. [...] One of the people
present stabbed her on various parts of her body with a piece of metal
heated over a candle. Then, someone mopped the blood from her vagina
with a tampax, [...] Finally the lawyer pierced her hand with a piece
of metal. Then they poured petrol on her and set her alight."

At the end of the hearing, XI drew a plan of the house where she said
the torture had taken place. What she drew was a rather classic plan of

a family mansion in Brussels, a pile of rubble that must have been a
garden, and the entrance to a cellar. Some of the details are striking.

Three little loops in the kitchen represent meat-hooks. The little
squares are two wooden tables that were left by the former owners. In
what must be the hall, XI drew a big line that crosses it diagonally.
This was a heavy metal pipe that she tripped over when she arrived, she

explained.

"She has been there"

For those who want to form an opinion of XI's credibility, it is
useful to know that the investigators of the 3rd Criminal Research
Section of the BSR had no knowledge at the beginning of November of the

investigation carried out in the past by the CID. After hearing XI
speak about Christine for the first time, some of the BSR men searched
in the archives. They found a few old press cuttings on the subject of
the murder of Christine Van Hees. This is not where XI could have found

her story. The newspapers give very different accounts of the situation

in which the body was found.

On 4 December, the investigators of the Brussels public prosecutor's
department went to look for the 84/85 file of the magistrate Van Espen.

What they discovered made them sit up. They found a detailed
description of the objects found at the scene of the crime. There was
mention, among other things, of some candle ends and a blood-soaked
tampax. These are just a few lines of a file which, piled up, measured
six feet. On certain points XI's version seemed more precise than the
old file. In the file it is stated several times that Christine Van
Hees was tied up with barbed wire. Barbed wire was also mentioned in
most of the newspaper articles. "Wrong," said XI, "it was electric wire

with the covering melted. The investigators rushed to the clerk's
office of the Brussels department and found the wire. It was an
electric wire with the covering melted.

In the autopsy report there was no mention of a metal object hammered
into Christine's wrists. After leafing through the file for days on
end, the attention of the BSR men was drawn by report no. 30.14.321/84,

drawn up by the Auderghem police on the evening of 13 February 1984. It

states: "A nail is hammered into her left wrist." A short while later,
they found the nail in the clerk's office. It was an enormous nail.
During further checks carried out by the BSR men at the beginning of
1997, it emerged that the nail was the object of an argument at the
time between the forensic surgeons and the first men to arrive on the
scene. The Auderghem policeman De Kock said he attracted the doctors'
attention to the nail, but they allegedly replied that they knew how to

carry out an autopsy. The fireman Norbert Vanden Berghen and his
colleague Yvan Leurquin were heard, thirteen years after the events.
They too spoke of a nail and said they couldn't understand how the
forensic surgeons could have forgotten it.

On 21 January 1997, 59-year-old José Ginderachter was heard. He is the

son of the man who once farmed the Champignionnière, and had lived in
the family mansion. When presented with XI's statement, all he could
say was: "This person must have been there."

Whether it was a matter of the three meat-hooks in the kitchen, the
pattern of the floor-tiles, the two wooden kitchen tables, a rainwater
barrel in the courtyard or the entrance to the Champignionnière,
Ginderachter could only confirm. On twelve concrete points, her
description matched what he could remember about the house. He was also

able to explain what XI had tripped over: "That pipe in the hall was a
piece of the old floor heating in the Champignionnière, which had been

left bare when the floor had been removed."

If we played the devil's advocate, we might suppose that XI had spent
a day in Auderghem by chance, in the former Champignionnière, and that

she had visited it. It is worth mentioning that at the time of the
events XI was 15 years old and lived in Ghent. The Champignionnière
was destroyed a year later to make way for a block of flats. Even if we

only trust material evidence, it is difficult not to conclude that XI
must have been present at the time of the murder. But isn't what she
has said about the authors of the murder too incredible? Dutroux and
Nihoul, committing a murder together in 1984? Didn't they meet in
1995?

"Ladies and gentlemen, we do not need XI to solve this crime," said an
investigator from the 3rd Criminal Research Section to the members of
the Verwilghen Committee, overwhelmed by astonishment when he was heard

in camera in October 1997. The man has spent months leafing through the

old CID file. His conclusion was as follows: "The names of the
murderers provided by XI have been indicated indirectly in the file
since 1984."

What follows is based on the testimonies from 1984.

Together at the skating-rink.

In the first few days after her murder, the police learned from her
classmates that Christine Van Hees had been leading a double life in
the months before her death. She had been missing school, not just on
the morning of 13 February 1984 but also the whole week from 20 to 25
January 1984. Without her parents knowing about it, she had received a
medical certificate from Dr. Hallard. According to her friends,
Christine often went out at night. All her friends pointed to the trail

of the Poséidon ice-skating rink in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. At the rink,

Ariane M. remembered that Christine had met "a certain Marc from the
Mons region". Her brother met Christine not long before her death in a
café with a certain Marc (later he would recognise him almost
certainly as the younger Marc Dutroux) During the weekend before her
death, Christine had a rendez-vous with " a certain Marc", according to

another friend. This Marc rode a motorbike. The CID never managed to
identify this mysterious figure. Françoise Dubois, the former wife of
Marc Dutroux, was able to tell the investigators at the beginning of
1997 that he often used to go the skating rinks in Forest and in
Woluwe-Saint-Lambert. "He often stayed all weekend in Brussels."
Michelle Martin met her husband at the rink. At the end of 1983 she was

at the end of her pregnancy. She confirmed in a statement given on 4
December 1996 that Dutroux often went alone to make contact with young
girls. At that time he used to ride a big motorbike.

Christine also used to go swimming a lot. Afterwards, according to her
friends, she would go to the cafeteria for a drink. On the first floor
of the Etterbeek swimming-pool were the premises of a free radio
station called Radio Activité. At the end of 1996, the radio station
was one of the key elements in the investigation of the Neufchâteau
public prosecutor's department. Because the leading character at
Radio Activité was none other than Michel Nihoul. Radio Activité
appeared on several occasions in the old file. Not long before her
death, some of Christine's friends saw her at parties organised
there.

At the time of the investigations about Serge C., in 1984, there was a
Radio Activité worker who came forward to offer "information" to the
CID investigators. This information often pointed in the direction of
the punk trail. This man received more attention from police officers
than the discotheque porter Freddy V. He advised them "to go and have a

look at the café Les Bouffons, a habitual meeting place for Radio
Activité people". The porter noticed Christine there not long before
her death. It wasn't really a place for a young girl like her,
according to Freddy V. Especially when we discover that Patrick Haemers

was also considered a habitué.

In the middle of the eighties, investigating magistrate Jean-Claude Van

Espen was obviously not to know that terms like "a certain Marc" or
"Radio Activité" would one day become enormous alarm signals in this
case. And yet there are other clues that point to Nihoul and his
circle. On 27 April 1987, the Etterbeek police received a phone call.
The conversation went as follows: - "Is that the Etterbeek Police
Station? Excuse me, sir. If you want some useful information, go and
have a look at the café Dolo, at 140 Rue Philippe Baucq." The police
officer: "What's going on there?"

"You might find out more about the Champignionnière."
"What do you mean?"
"On the corner of Rue Philippe Baucq, the Dolo. If you go there from
time to time, you'll find out more about the Champignionnière."
"Why do you say that, sir?"
At this moment the caller was cut off. The conversation, recorded on
tape, can be found in the old 64/85 file (statement 33797, Etterbeek
Police). No investigations were ever made into the café Dolo. And yet
there were also other reasons for doing so. Shortly after the murder,
Muriel A. learnt that Christine had told her parents that she slept at
her house every now and then - which was not true. Nathalie G.
recalled that after a night out, two weeks before her death, Christine
had begged her to accompany her home, "because she was afraid of
someone".

Then there was Fabienne K. She stated to the Brussels CID that she saw
Christine every day on the bus, and that Christine had told her she was

part of a group of people "older than her" who held "secret meetings".
K. stressed the fact that Christine did not mention punks or skinheads.

On 20 February 1984, Fabienne K. stated as follows (from statement no.
7112):

"Christine never spoke about this to the girls in her class. She told
me more or less that this group practised free love [...]. She told me
that the group attracted her and worried her at the same time. She said

she wanted to make a break from them because some serious things had
happened [...]. Christine had a personal diary that she kept hidden
somewhere [...]. She had clashed with another girl in the group. She
felt very attracted by one of the members. That's how she described
the group: 'They're pigs, but I feel good with them.' She told me
that when you had become part of these circles, you would never be able

to leave. If she spoke about it, they would kill her and set her house
on fire. [...] She said there was no point talking about it because
no-one would believe her."

Fabienne K. confirmed her story to the CID in 1993, and again at the
beginning of 1997 to the officers of the 3rd Criminal Research Section.

So there was no real need for new clues. Meanwhile, XI had listed the
addresses where Annie Bouty and/or Michel Nihoul lived in 1984. The
addresses were checked and found to match. The BSR officers also
resumed the search for cars with the eagle. And Marlène De Cockere, a
friend of Nihoul, had bought a Mitsubishi Celeste in April 1983 with an

eagle painted on the bonnet. This piece of evidence is the least
certain of the series of checks carried out by the team of Warrant
Officer De Baets. In the middle of the investigation into this car, De
Baets and three other investigators were removed from the Neufchâteau
unit in mid-August. (see inset).

XI wasn't always so precise, true. And De Baets and his team
sometimes worked in a hasty manner. But the small errors that the
"re-examination" charged them with are not important enough to call the

value of the investigation into question. At the transcription phase,
things didn't always go smoothly. Warrant Officer De Baets and
Philippe Hupez have her say in a statement that "Bernard Weinstein" was

also present at the time of the murder. On the original video, it is
rather different. XI speaks of a man "I think might have been
Weinstein". Neither XI, nor Hupez, nor least of all De Baets made this
correction. And yet it is of immense importance. Bernard Weinstein was
in prison in France until the end of 1985. Just before they were
dismissed, the investigators made another discovery about Marc Dutroux.

On 15 February 1984, he opened a current account at the Crédit
Professional bank in Hainaut. In the next three days, a total of
200,000 Belgian francs were paid into the account. 15th February, that
is two days after the murder of Christine Van Hees.

While awaiting the results of the "re-examination", investigating
magistrate Van Espen has been following a new trail for the last few
weeks: that of the Brussels punks...

How the re-examination has "broken" the 1997 file

Well before the beginning of the debate about the possible transfer of
the annexed files of the Dutroux case to other judicial districts, such

a transfer had already taken place on 27 January 1997 for some parts of

the file 96/109 of the Neufchâteau public prosecutor's department.
File 96/109 was the file opened by investigating magistrate Connerotte
to gather together all the statements by the victims of paedophile
crimes. When a testimony proved to have some link with an investigation

in progress into the murder of a child, this part was transferred to
the district concerned. In the case of the Champignonnière, the
district concerned was Brussels.

"You will have trouble," X predicted when the investigating officers
thought she would be pleased at the news of the transfer. And yet
everything indicated that the withdrawal of the file from Neufchâteau
would be beneficial in terms of efficacy. If one of XI's statements
can be considered significant, it is exactly this prediction.

Things become difficult for XI

The trouble would begin with the leaks concerning the letter sent by
investigating magistrates Leys and Van Espen on 29 October 1996 to
various judicial authorities. The two magistrates, specialised in
financial cases, complained that the financial section (3rd Criminal
Research Section) of the Brussels BSR was now working only on the
Dutroux case and hardly at all on financial investigations. The reason
why Van Espen complained at the end of 1996 of a lack of staff for his
financial cases, but at the same time took back a file that he
described as "the nail in my coffin" is not clear. The first thing that

Van Espen discovered, on this occasion, was a thorough analysis of the
old Van Hees file by a conscientious member of the BSR. In this
analysis, Van Espen's investigation is described as erratic. It could
be seen that he had constantly neglected all evidence that led to the
trail of Dutroux and Nihoul.

On 20 June 1997, a meeting took place between Van Espen, the
Gendarmerie Commander Duterme (at the head of the Neufchâteau unit of
the 3rd Criminal Research Section since the end of 1996) and several
investigators. Warrant Officers De Baets and Mertens, who co-ordinated
almost all the work of the unit, were not invited. There was a reason
for this. The meeting was about them. Duterme and Van Espen claimed
that De Baets had falsified a statement. What had happened? At the end
of the hearing of 18 November (see above), De Baets showed XI a series
of photos. One of them was that of Christine Van Hees. "Is she among
these photos?" asked De Baets. XI nodded. "Would you point her out?".
XI said no. She wanted the hearing to end and she didn't want to look
at the photos any more "because everything comes back to me". De Baets
insisted. XI got angry. She wanted to go home. She didn't want to
testify ever again, she said. She deliberately pointed to another
photo. In his report, De Baets wrote that "XI recognised the photo of
Christine", because during the course of a later hearing she pointed to

the photo without faltering.

Duterme, however, accused De Baets of "false transcription". Van Espen
added another complaint. He had discovered that De Baets had provided a

piece of information about Nihoul to Councillor Marique of the
Verwilghen Committee. A procedural fault, claimed Van Espen. De Baets
should have asked for his permission. On 22 June, in a long letter to
the public prosecutor Benoît Dejemeppe, Van Espen declared "his
concern about the contamination of this investigation".

The path taken by Van Espen's letter is a clear sign of the
environment in which the 96/109 file rests. Dejemeppe sent the letter
to the national magistrate Van Oudenhove, who sent it on to the
Minister of Justice De Clerck. He sent it to the Public prosecutor of
Liège, Thily, who judged it to be a matter for Brussels. Thily sent it

back to Dejemeppe, who finally instructed investigating magistrate
Pignolet to carry our an investigation for false transcription "against

unknown parties". Meanwhile, various complaints began to pour in. At
the CID, Superintendent Marnette accused Superintendent Suys, and vice
versa. Due to a statement by Suys to the Verwilghen Committee, quoted
wrongly in the press. Chief Superintendent De Vroom raged against the
Brussels BSR because he thought it was the source of the mad incest
story regarding his daughter. Within the 3rd Criminal Research Section,

Duterme added a complaint against De Baets for the question of the
photo. In some newspapers all this became a carry-on with De Baets
indicated as the great orchestrator, also of the ridiculous search of
the Abrasax Satanic sect, the Jumet searches and the Di Rupo affair...

Pan publishes a "scoop"

Pignolet was instructed to separate the wheat from the chaff. He looked

mainly at the chaff. De Baets had nothing to do with Jumet, Abrasax, De

Vroom or Di Rupo. If we study file 96/109 closely, we discover that on
6 December 1996, in report no. 117.487, De Baets noted carefully that
on 18 November XI had pointed to the wrong photo because she was
breaking down. Van Espen and Duterme do not seem to have noticed this
report. The deluge of complaints soon made people forget that there was

an investigation into the murder of Christine Van Hees. It seemed, in
fact, that the murder investigation was only secondary. At a certain
point it was only a case of "faulty and suggestive methods of inquiry",

and investigating magistrate Jacques Langlois ordered a
"re-examination" of all the investigations that had been opened on the
basis of file 96/109. This "re-examination", which was to take no more
than a few weeks - was to find out whether De Baets and his team
really influenced their witnesses.

On 21 August, the weekly magazine Pan (owned by the former Prime
Minister Paul Vanden) wrote that De Baets and three of his officers at
the Neufchâteau unit had been removed from the investigation. The
headline was "Verwilghen, Knokke-out" - whatever that means. The
strange thing is that no decision had yet been made. It was only on 25
August that the four officers were informed by Colonel Brabant that
they had been removed from the unit, "temporarily" until the completion

of the re-examination. Today, 7 January 1997, the re-examination is
still in progress. File 96/109 has already been re-read twice. After a
first (unofficial) re-reading, then a second, a third was begun at the
beginning of July. According to the latest news, this has almost
reached completion and does not in any way suggest that XI was "helped"

during questioning. Meanwhile, the 3rd Criminal Research Section is
divided into two camps which are at daggers drawn, and no-one believes
that the four officers will be able to rejoin the Neufchâteau unit. It

seems that nothing will ever come out of any investigation. After the
many examinations and re-examinations of the confidential file 96/109,
so many copies have circulated that the authors of the crimes described

by XI must by now know the contents better than anyone. At the end of
November, one of the Gendarmerie analysts left the whole Van Hees file
lying around in the boot of his car, where it was stolen.

To the vast majority of Americans, the name Marc Dutroux does not mean
much. Drop that name in Belgium though and you are likely to elicit
some very visceral reactions. Dutroux - convicted along with his wife
in 1989 for the rape and violent abuse of five young girls, the
youngest of whom was just eleven - now stands accused of being a key
player in an international child prostitution and pornography ring
whose practices included kidnapping, rape, sadistic torture, and
murder.

Dutroux was sentenced in 1989 to thirteen years for his crimes, but was

freed after having served just three. This was in spite of the fact
that, as prison governor Yvan Stuaert would later tell a parliamentary
commission: "A medical report described him as a perverse psychopath,
an explosive mix. He was an evident danger to society." The man who
turned Dutroux loose on society, Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet,
was rewarded with a prestigious appointment to serve as a judge at the
European Court of Justice at The Hague.

Shortly after Dutroux's release, young girls began to disappear in
the vicinity of some of his homes. Though technically unemployed and
drawing welfare from the state, he nevertheless owned at least six
houses and lived quite lavishly. His rather lucrative income appears to

have been derived from trading in child sex-slaves, child prostitution,

and child pornography. Many of his houses appeared to stand vacant,
though at least some of them were in fact used as torture and
imprisonment centers where kidnapped girls were taken and held in
underground dungeons. Some of Dutroux's homes were used in this way
for several years following his early release, with a growing body of
evidence to indicate that fact to the police. Authorities nevertheless
failed to act on the information, or acted on it in ways that implied
either complete incompetence (according to most press reports), or
police complicity in the operation (according to any sort of logic).

Officials seem to have routinely ignored tips that later proved
accurate, including a report from Dutroux's own mother that her son was

holding girls prisoner in one of his houses. In addition, key facts
were withheld from investigators working on the disappearances and
lines of communication were unaccountably broken, inexcusably hindering

the investigation. Police did search one of Dutroux's homes on no less
than three separate occasions over the course of the investigation. On
at least two of those occasions, two of the missing girls were being
held in heinous conditions, imprisoned in a custom-built dungeon in the

basement. Nevertheless, according to the Guardian, the police searches
came up empty - even though the investigating officers reported
"hearing children's voices on one occasion."

It was not until August 13, 1996, four years after the disappearances
began, that authorities arrested Dutroux, along with his wife (an
elementary school teacher), a lodger, a policeman, and a man the
Guardian described as "an associate with political connections" -
elsewhere identified as Jean-Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman and
nightclub owner. One of those taken into custody - Michel Lelievre,
described in a May 2002 BBC report as a "drug addict and petty
thief" - reportedly told his interrogators that at least some of the
girls abducted by the ring "were kidnapped to order, for someone
else." This was just one of many statements by suspects and witnesses
that would later be dismissed by Belgian officials.

Two days after the arrests, police again searched Dutroux's home and
discovered the soundproof dungeon/torture center. As CNN reported,
three years earlier "police ignored tips from an informant who said
Dutroux was building secret cellars to hold girls before selling them
abroad." In addition, in 1995, the same informant had told police
that Dutroux had offered an unidentified third man "the equivalent of
$3,000 to $5,000 to kidnap girls." Incredibly, it was later reported
by the Guardian that police actually had in their possession a
videotape of the dungeon being constructed: "Belgian police could
have saved the lives of two children [who were] allegedly murdered by
the paedophile Marc Dutroux if they had watched a video seized from his

home which showed him building their hidden cell." The tape had been
seized in one of the earlier searches.

At the time of the final search, two fourteen-year-old girls were found

imprisoned in the dungeon, chained and starving. They described to
police how they had been used as child prostitutes and in the
production of child pornography videos. More than 300 such videos were
taken into custody by the police.

On August 17, 1996, the story got grimmer as police dug up the bodies
of two eight-year-old girls at another of Dutroux's homes. It would
later be learned that the girls had been kept in one of Dutroux's
dungeons for nine months after their abductions, during which time they

were repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted - all captured on
videotape. The girls were then left to slowly starve to death.
Alongside of their decimated corpses was the body of Bernard Weinstein,

a former accomplice of Dutroux who had occupied one of the houses for
several years. Weinstein had been buried alive.

A few weeks later, two more girls were found buried under concrete at
yet another of the Dutroux properties. By that time, ten people
connected to the case were reportedly in custody. As the body count
mounted, the outrage of the Belgian people grew. They demanded to know
why this man, dubbed the 'Belgian Beast,' had been released after
having served such an absurdly short sentence. And they demanded to
know why, as evidence had continued to mount and girls had continued to

disappear, the police had chosen to do nothing. How many girls, they
wanted to know, had been killed due to this inaction?

Adding further fuel to the fire, as a Los Angeles Times report
revealed, were claims by "a highly regarded children's activist,
Marie-France Botte ... [that] the Justice Ministry is sitting on a
politically sensitive list of customers of pedophile videotapes." The
same report noted, "the affair has become further clouded by the
discovery of a motorcycle that reportedly matches the description of
one used in the 1991 assassination of prominent Belgian businessman and

politician Andre Cools. Michel Bourlet, the head prosecutor on the
pedophile case, meanwhile, has publicly declared that the investigation

can be thoroughly pursued only without political interference. Several
years ago, Bourlet was removed from the highly charged Cools case,
which remains unsolved."

A report in Time magazine alluded to murky links between the Dutroux
operation and organized crime figures. Marc Verwilghen - the chief
investigating magistrate on the case - stated the case more bluntly:
"For me, the Dutroux affair is a question of organised crime." Also
mentioned in the Time article was the use of secret "underground
tunnels," not unlike those described by children a decade earlier at
the infamous McMartin Preschool.

Outrage continued to grow as more arrests were made and evidence of
high-level government and police complicity continued to emerge. One of

Dutroux's accomplices, businessman Jean-Michel Nihoul, confessed to
organizing an 'orgy' at a Belgian chateau that had been attended by
government officials, a former European Commissioner, and a number of
law enforcement officers. A Belgian senator noted, quite accurately,
that such parties were part of a system "which operates to this day
and is used to blackmail the highly placed people who take part."

According to the BBC, Nihoul has brazenly claimed: "I am the monster
of Belgium." He has all but dared the state to prosecute him,
claiming that he is beyond the reach of the law because he has
information that, if made public, "would bring the Government and the
entire state down."

In September 1996, twenty-three suspects - at least nine of whom were
police officers - were detained and questioned about their possible
complicity in the crimes and/or their negligence in investigating the
case. As the Los Angeles Times noted in a very brief, two-sentence
report, the detainments "were the latest indication that police in
the southern city of Charleroi may have helped cover up the alleged
crimes of Marc Dutroux." The arrests followed raids on the police
officers' homes and on the headquarters of the Charleroi police force
and were based on information supplied by police inspector Georges
Zicot, who had already been charged as an accomplice. Three magistrates

had also reportedly been interrogated by police investigators.

Just days before the arrests, police had also arrested five suspects in

the Cools assassination, including a former regional government
minister named Alain VanderBiest. Strangely enough, the News Telegraph
reported that: "Police investigating the Cools murder in 1991 ...
have been given helpful leads by some of those arrested in the Dutroux
case." The Telegraph also noted that Cools "had promised
'shocking revelations' before his death."

On October 14, 1996 came the straw that broke the camel's back:
Jean-Marc Connerotte, who had been serving as the investigating judge
on the Dutroux case, was dismissed by the Belgian Supreme Court.
Connerotte was viewed by the people as something of a rarity: a public
official/law enforcement officer who actually appeared to be pursuing a

prosecution, rather than a cover-up. The News Telegraph described him
as: "the only figure in the judiciary who enjoys the nation's
confidence." As the New York Times reported, Connerotte "became a
national hero in August after saving two children from a secret dungeon

kept by a convicted child rapist and ordering the inquiry that led to
the discovery of the bodies of four girls kidnapped by a child
pornography network." He had also arrested three men in 1994 as
suspects in the Cools assassination - just before the case was
transferred to the jurisdiction of another magistrate.

Victimized as a child by top-level perpetrators who today claim she is
insane. The detail of Regina's testimony is extraordinary. In 1996, she

named and described in great detail, to a specially assembled police
team, the people and places involved in the paedophile ring. Senior
judges, one of the country's most powerful politicians - now dead - and

a very influential banker were included. One of the regular organisers
of these parties, she said, was the man she knew as 'Mich', Jean Michel

Nihoul. The sessions not only involved sex, they included sadism,
torture and murder; and again, she described in detail, the place, the
victims and how they were killed. She also claimed the young Marc
Dutroux was there. "At these parties Nihoul was a sort of party beast
while Dutroux was more on the side." SEE VIDEO CLIPS ON THE "BELGIAN
X-FILES"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent_europe/1962244.stm

A May 2002 BBC report revealed that, after Connerotte's removal, a
"special team of police officers interviewing Regina Louf and the
other 'X' witnesses, as they were called, were the next to be
sacked." The "X" witnesses were victims of the pedophile ring who
had come forward to tell harrowing tales of their victimization.

A woman named Regina Louf was the first of eleven such victims to be
interviewed by police officials. Louf claimed that she had been
victimized by the ring - which included her parents and her grandmother

- from the time that she was a very young child. She described the
operation in detail to authorities, supplying them with names - names
that included "senior judges, one of the country's most powerful
politicians - now dead - and a very influential banker." According to
Louf, the operation "was big business - blackmail - there was a lot
of money involved." Many of her victimizers, she said, were secretly
filmed for blackmail purposes.

Louf identified Michel Nihoul as a regular organizer of 'parties.'
These parties, she said, "not only involved sex, they included
sadism, torture and murder." She described in detail the murdered
victims, and how and where they were killed. The BBC reported that when

police checked into Louf's claims, they were able to verify "key
elements of Regina's story and found [that] at least one murder that
she says she witnessed matched an unsolved murder." Nevertheless, the
same BBC report revealed that, "today in Belgium Regina Louf's
reputation is destroyed. The Prosecutor General of Liege, Anne Thilly,
declares she's completely mad despite numerous statements from
independent psychologists to the contrary." According to the judges
now on the case, "her testimony has been declared worthless" and
will not be presented in any trial of Dutroux or his associates.

Connerotte's removal from the Dutroux case fanned the smoldering
flames of public outrage; as the Times reported, "Hundreds of
thousands of people had petitioned the high court to retain the
judge." Adding yet more fuel to the fire, prosecutor Michel Bourlet
was claiming that evidence indicated a pedophile ring, composed of the
wealthy and powerful, had been protected for twenty-five years. With
the families of Dutroux's victims calling for a general strike, men and

women all across the country walked away from their jobs in protest as
railway workers and bus drivers shut down public transportation,
bringing some cities to a virtual standstill. The Telegraph reported
that, "in Liege, firemen turned their hoses on the city's court
building" to symbolize the massive clean-up that was in order.

On October 20, 1996, 350,000 citizens of the tiny nation of Belgium
took to the streets of Brussels dressed all in white, demanding the
reform of a system so corrupt that it would protect the abusers,
rapists, torturers, and killers of children. The political fallout from

the case ultimately brought about the resignation of Belgium's State
Police Chief, Interior Minister, and Justice Minister, who became
sacrificial lambs tossed to the outraged masses to avoid what could
easily have exploded into a full-scale insurrection by the people,
particularly after police 'incompetence' allowed Dutroux to
'escape' and remain at large for a brief time in April 1998.

There were in fact calls from the people for the entire coalition
government to step down. Months later, an opinion survey by Brussels'
Le Soir newspaper found that only one in five Belgians still had
confidence in the federal government and in the nation's criminal
justice system. As the Los Angeles Times reported in January 1998,
"the conviction remains stubbornly widespread that members of the
upper crust - government ministers, the Roman Catholic Church, the
court of King Albert II - belonged to child sex rings, or protected
them."

A formal denial by King Albert II will go into every book
FLASHBACK: Belgian king wins paedophile rebuttal. The French publishers

of a book about paedophelia in Belgium have been ordered to insert a
formal denial by the Belgian King, Albert II, of some of the
allegations it contains. King Albert and the Belgian Government went to

court in Paris because they said the book, The Paedophile Dossier,
contained a series of unfounded libels. The book, by two French
journalists, is a sensationalist account of the case of Marc Dutroux,
the alleged sex offender and killer whose discovery five years ago
caused such trauma in Belgium and the country's political
establishment. Apart from general accusations of government cover-ups,
the authors personally connect the name of King Albert with the
scandal, saying that as crown prince he attended parties at which
paedophiles were present.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1609411.stm

The lingering distrust of the people was not alleviated by the fact
that a parliamentary inquiry had identified, in April 1997, thirty
officials who had, as the Times tactfully put it, "failed to uncover
Dutroux's misdeeds." Nearly a year later, none of them had yet
suffered any repercussions. Additionally, at least ten missing children

suspected of having fallen prey to Dutroux's operation have never
been found.

Just a few months before the parliamentary commission issued its report

on the Dutroux case, viewed by many as a shameless cover-up, the
Telegraph reported, "grim rumors ... have been circulating that a
second paedophile network at least as appalling may have been operating

in parallel to that said to involve Dutroux." The bodies of seven
children were believed to have been hidden by the ring, which was
thought could be linked to Dutroux through Michel Nihoul. Two months
after that, a man named Patrick Derochette and three of his family
members were arrested following the discovery of the body of a
nine-year-old girl. Rumors quickly began circulating linking that crime

to Dutroux as well. Like Dutroux, Derochette had previously been
convicted on multiple counts of child rape. He had been committed to a
psychiatric institution from which he was released after just six
weeks. Authorities quickly denied that there was any connection between

the cases. In January 1998, however, the Telegraph reported, "new
evidence from a lawyer involved in the investigations blows a hole in
previous police claims that there was no link between the cases
involving the alleged child murderers Marc Dutroux and Patrick
Derochette." Once again, the connection was said to be through
Nihoul.

In April 1999, the Guardian weighed in with this report: "the highly
respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the [Dutroux] case
claims that his commission's findings were muzzled by political and
judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in the
crimes ... Mr. Verwilghen claims that senior political and legal
figures refused to cooperate with the inquiry. He says magistrates and
police were officially told to refuse to answer certain questions, in
what he describes as 'a characteristic smothering operation.'"

As of May 2002, nearly six years after Dutroux was taken into custody,
his trial had yet to begin. Parents of victims continued to loudly
shout of a cover-up, and the Telegraph was reporting that: "It was
recently learnt that scientific tests on 6,000 hairs found in the
[underground dungeon] began only this year." Those tests, of course,
could reveal how many victims passed through Dutroux's chamber of
horrors. Perhaps more importantly, they could also, as a BBC News
report noted in January 2002, "establish whether the girls had any
other visitors."

Anne Thilly, the aforementioned Prosecutor General of Liege who
dismissed as "mad" a key prosecution witness, has been quoted as
saying, "there was no need to get the hairs analysed as no one else
entered the cage. There was no network so there was no need to look for

evidence of one. In any case, the hairs have all now been analysed."
Thilly gave no indication of how she knew there was nothing to find
before even bothering to look. And contrary to her claims, the BBC
reported in May 2002 that the hairs had "still not been analysed,"
according to "sources central to the investigation." Thilly has
also claimed "the bodies [recovered from Dutroux's properties] were
too decomposed to test for DNA." The BBC though noted "the autopsy
states quite clearly that the bodies were not decomposed. Samples were
taken. It is just that no one seems to know what has happened to the
results." It would appear, alas, as though Anne Thilly is a rather
brazen liar.

The January BBC report came on the heels of an interview that the
imprisoned Dutroux granted a Flemish journalist and a Belgian senator.
Therein, Dutroux was quoted as admitting, "a network with all kinds
of criminal activities really does exist. But the authorities don't
want to look into it." He also acknowledged the existence of "a
well-grounded [paedophile] ring. I maintained regular contact with
people in this ring. However, the law does not want to investigate this

lead."

If the Marc Dutroux case were some kind of aberration, it would still
be a disturbing story for the level of unspeakable corruption and
depravity of the Belgian political and law enforcement establishment of

which it speaks. Far more disturbing is the fact that it does not
appear to be an isolated case at all.

As 1999 drew to a close, the nation of Latvia was rocked by a child
prostitution/child pornography scandal that reached to the very top of
the political power structure. The case first broke in August, when
police uncovered a massive operation involving as many as 2,000
severely abused children. When media reports began linking top Latvian
officials to the case, a special parliamentary commission was assembled

to investigate the emerging allegations. In February 2000, the chairman

of the commission delivered a report to Parliament linking the
country's Prime Minister and Justice Minister, the director of the
State Revenue Service, and a number of army and law enforcement
officers to the case. A campaign was immediately begun to discredit the

committee chairman, including allegations that he is tied to the former

KGB - a classic case of red baiting that enabled the allegations to
be dismissed as 'Communist' propaganda.

On November 27, 2002, The Guardian reported that many among
Portugal's elite were linked to a pedophile ring as well: "A
scandal over a paedophile ring run from a state orphanage gripped
Portugal yesterday as it threatened to engulf diplomats, media
personalities and senior politicians. Photographs of unnamed senior
government officials with young boys from Lisbon's Casa Pia orphanage
were among the evidence reportedly available to police after they
arrested a former orphanage employee called Carlos Silvino." One
revelation in the case was "that systematic sexual abuse of children
at the home had allegedly been going on for more than 20 years and had
been known to police and other authorities for most of that time."
Teresa Costa Macedo, a former secretary of state for families, has said

that she sent a dossier to police twenty years ago containing
"damning proof" of the abuse, including photographs and eyewitness
statements. The information was not acted upon, and, for her trouble,
Macedo became the victim of a campaign of threats and intimidation.

In June 2003, the Independent reported that police "at first denied
her reports existed," but then later produced them. Macedo has
testified before parliament that the former president, Antonio Ramalho
Eanes, the former foreign secretary, Jaime Garcia, and elements within
the police all knew of the ongoing abuse. An official report claims
that, "among the children still living at Casa Pia, at least 128 had
been subjected to sexual abuse. Many are deaf and dumb." Countless
other victims have passed through the facility over the last thirty
years. Among those detained or questioned in the case were Carlos Cruz,

known in Portugal as "Mr. Television"; Manuel Abrantes, a former
director of Casa Pia; Joao Ferreira Diniz, a doctor at Casa Pia; Jorge
Ritto, a former ambassador to UNESCO; Hugo Marcal, Carlos Silvino's
former attorney; Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, Portugal's Socialist Party
leader; television talk show host Herman Jose; and Paulo Pedroso, a
former Labour minister.

A follow-up report in the Independent noted that Casa Pia, founded by a

police superintendent, first "came under scrutiny 20 years ago when a
young inmate died ... Officials found the home's doors open all night
and youngsters in a cruising area for male prostitutes. Four children
aged between eight and 12, missing for a fortnight, were found in a
luxury flat in nearby Cascais owned by a diplomat." That diplomat was
Jorge Ritto. It is now alleged that Silvino, an employee and former
resident of Casa Pia, acted for years to procure young boys for rich
and powerful pedophiles, including Ritto. Adolescent witnesses have
claimed on Portuguese television that they were offered enticements and

"then raped ... and recruited for sex parties with powerful
'friends.' Others, now adult, have told of chilling experiences
long suppressed." A Portuguese organization calling itself Innocence
in Danger has been working for years to publicize the problem of child
abuse and child abductions in the country, but have been unable to
penetrate what they describe as a "media blackout."

As of February 2003, a campaign was underway in Scotland to unseal
records that have been sealed for 100 years under special order. The
records concern the activities of Thomas Hamilton, a notorious child
molester/murderer who was credited with killing sixteen schoolchildren
and a teacher, and then himself, in 1996. One police report sealed
under the order "concerns Thomas Hamilton's activities at a summer
camp in Loch Lomond in 1991, five years before the shootings," and
allegedly links Hamilton to "figures in the Scottish establishment,
including two senior politicians and a lawyer," according to the
Guardian.

A report in Scotland's Sunday Herald, from March 2003, revealed that
106 documents had been sealed. These included "a letter connected to
Hamilton, which was sent by George Robertson, currently head of NATO,
to Michael Forsyth, who was then Secretary of State for Scotland," as
well as "correspondence relating to Thomas Hamilton's alleged
involvement in Freemasonry." A deputy justice minister, Michael
Matheson, was quoted in the article questioning the official
justification for sealing the documents: "The explanation to date
about the 100-year rule was that it was put in place to protect the
interests of children named in the Central Police Report. How can that
explanation stand when children aren't named?"

On September 29, 2000, The Irish Times reported that yet another
pedophile network had surfaced: "Eight people were arrested in Italy
and three in Russia, and police said 1,700 people were being
investigated in Italy." The images traded by this ring were
"divided into several categories ... The most gruesome, police said,
was coded 'Necros Pedo,' in which children were raped and tortured
to death."

And so it is that we first confront that most disturbing of topics -
snuff films, which most people assume do not actually exist. As
recently as February 1999, the New York Post assured readers that:
"Snuff films are the stuff of urban legend ... how did this legend
get started? No one knows." The unfortunate truth though is that
snuff films do actually exist, and they likely have existed for as long

as film has existed, though they were not always known by that name.
According to the Post: "The term 'snuff' was actually coined
during the Charles Manson case, when press reports repeated a rumor
that the Manson 'family' had filmed home movies of the brutal
slayings." Other reports hold that the term was coined in 1976 by a
writer for the New York Times who was in need of a phrase to describe
reports of murders following sexual activity being captured on film.

In the late 1970s, as Carl Raschke noted in Painted Black, the "Texas
House Select Committee on Child Pornography disclosed ... that
investigators probing leads to organized crime in Houston, Dallas, and
other major cities found that 'slave' auctions for sixteen- and
seventeen-year-old boys were routinely held in Mexico. Some of the boys

were featured in brutal snuff or 'slasher' movies." Raschke also
quotes from a study by U.S. mental health professionals that claims
that a child from Mexico "can be packaged, delivered, and sold deep
within [the United States] in a short time," and that many are
purchased solely "for the purpose of killing."

In Enslaved, Gordon Thomas reported that: "At the start of the year
[1991] Britain's Scotland Yard was continuing to investigate reports
that up to twenty children in London had been murdered last year in
[snuff films] and the video tapes sold on the Continent." Journalist
Nick Davies, writing for the Guardian in November 2000, revisited that
investigation, which was centered on a group of British pedophiles
living in Amsterdam. The investigation revealed that the men were
running gay brothels that were essentially 'fronts' for trafficking
underage boys, many purchased from the streets of economically ravaged
Eastern Europe, and others collected from the streets of London.
Prominent among the group of pedophiles were a man named Alan Williams,

known as the "Welsh Witch," and another named Warwick Spinks, who
according to Davies, "pioneered the trafficking of boys as young as
10."

The men used the boys in the production of child pornography and,
according to several witnesses, in the production of snuff films.

Davies wrote: "not just once but repeatedly, evidence had come to the

attention of police in England and the Netherlands, that, for pleasure
and profit, some of the exiled paedophiles in Amsterdam had murdered
boys in front of the camera." Indeed, witnesses had independently
given descriptions of snuff films that were remarkably consistent in
the details of the types of torture used and the manner of death,
though the descriptions of the victim and the filming location
differed, indicating that a number of such films had been made. One
witness claimed to have seen five such films.

In the fall of 1998, British detectives flew to Amsterdam to
investigate a particularly detailed account provided by a witness. The
investigators had in their possession: a detailed description of the
apartment where the witness had viewed the tape; the name of ...