Pedophile Suspect Is Back in News
More than five years after Marc Dutroux’s arrest on charges of abduction, rape and killing of young girls, Belgium’s most notorious prisoner and his infamous pedophilia scandal were back on the front pages Tuesday.
The Belgian weekly Humo published correspondence that Dutroux had with a journalist over the last year, in which he denied killing four of the girls he is accused of kidnapping.
On Monday night, the VTM television network aired a prison interview with Dutroux in which he suggested that Belgian authorities did not want to investigate pedophile networks.
Although Dutroux divulged no new information on the cases, the sudden media spotlight has brought one of Belgium’s biggest postwar scandals to the fore again.
Dutroux’s case led to an overhaul of Belgian law enforcement agencies after revelations of inept police work in the search for the missing children provoked widespread outrage.
Dutroux is serving a five-year sentence for a 1998 escape. His trial on the kidnapping, rape and murder charges is expected to begin early next year.
Dutroux was arrested Aug. 13, 1996, while on parole after serving less than half of a 13-year sentence for abducting and raping five girls in the mid-1980s.
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