Belgian investigators on Thursday continued to question confessed French serial killer Michel Fourniret, who has already admitted to nine murders, over a number of other alleged crimes.
Authorities in the city of Dinant on Thursday quizzed the 62-year-old forester for four hours.
Fourniret, who has confessed to killing nine people, most of them young women, in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001, refuses to deviate from earlier statements to police and rejects accusations by his wife that he murdered an unidentified au pair in 1993, according to his lawyer.
But French police and officials are reportedly reinvestigating about 30 unsolved murders and disappearances while Belgian authorities have reopened a dozen unsolved cases. Many believe Fourniret’s confessions to be incomplete and have cast doubt on his assertion that he was inactive between 1990 and 2000.
”It wouldn’t surprise me if Fourniret was found to be responsible for some [of the unsolved murders],” serial killer expert Stephane Bourgoin told newspaper De Morgen. ”It’s impossible that he had no victims during this period.”
As further details of Fouriret’s 16-year catalogue of crime began to emerge, police authorities in other European countries were said to be closely observing the case.
”German and Dutch police are interested too, and with good reason,” said a source at the Paris police academy.
Fourniret is apparently eager to confront his wife, Monique Olivier, over her statements to police, said his lawyer, Luc Balleux.
”He is amazingly calm and absolutely not worried about anything his wife could tell police,” Balluex told Paris daily Le Figaro.
Olivier has implicated her husband in 10 murders.
”But he bears no resentment towards her and thinks she has been put under pressure by police,” Balleux claimed. — Sapa-DPA