In the atmosphere of despair that hangs over Liege, the biggest shock is to see children innocently enjoying themselves. As Adrienne, five, launches herself for the umpteenth time down a playground slide, her grandmother, Christine Maertens, sits on a bench thinking back.
”It is an awful feeling,” said Mrs Maertens (45) ”and it hangs over the whole city. You keep thinking you have seen the little girls. You walk past a cellar ventilation duct and you imagine hearing a child’s cry for help.”
The probable abduction, during a street party in the early hours of last Saturday, of Stacy Lemmens, seven, and Nathalie Mahy (10) has shot Belgium 11 years back in time — to chilling memories of the notorious paedophile Marc Dutroux. Once again the Ardennes city of Liege is the focal point; it was from a town near here that Dutroux, now serving a life sentence, abducted his first two victims. Once again this small country — which lost a government and saw its legal and police system disgraced by the Dutroux case — is asking itself whether enough has been done to protect its children.
There are similarities with the Dutroux case and, importantly, there is still a slim hope the girls are alive. A man with a previous child rape conviction, Abdallah Ait Oud (38) is in preventive custody on a kidnapping charge. He denies abducting the girls and will be released on Monday if police cannot build a case against him.
In the poor Saint-Leonard neighbourhood, stepsisters Nathalie and Stacy grin from ”missing” posters. Their parents, Catherine Dizier and Thierry Lemmens, were at a street carnival with their six children last Saturday. At 3am, Dizier realised the girls had disappeared.
Lemmens raised the alarm, calling in members of his motorcycling club to scour this neighbourhood of low-rise brick bedsits, disused workshops and a smattering of small shops that serve a large multi-ethnic population.
The police quickly checked the whereabouts of known sex offenders, brought in sniffer dogs and a helicopter, and dredged the Meuse river nearby. They just missed Ait Oud at his flat on Sunday. He surrendered on Tuesday after friends saw his details on TV at half-time in the France-Switzerland World Cup match.
”The terrible reality that has been brought home to us here in Saint-Leonard,” said Maertens, ”is that no safeguards seem to be good enough.” Eleven years ago, when Dutroux began abducting girls, she feared for her 12-year-old daughter Corinne’s safety. On Saturday in the playground she was guarding 22-year-old Corinne’s daughter, Adrienne.
”The Dutroux case cost us a government and seriously damaged Belgians’ view of their police and legal system. Three hundred thousand people demonstrated in Brussels on the White March in 1996. By the time Dutroux was jailed two years ago we felt it could never happen again,” she said.
Despite reforming its police and establishing the Child Focus support network and hotline, Belgium stopped short of creating a DNA register of sex offenders and introducing the controversial practice of alerting burgermeisters (mayors) to released offenders living in their areas.
Ait Oud is reported to have a long criminal history that began with scooter thefts as a teenager. Born in Belgium of Algerian parents, he was described last week by Jacques Chantry, head of the federal police in Liege, as ”a psychopath with no sense of right or wrong”.
In 1995, according to reports, he was jailed for four years for raping his 14-year-old niece. In 2001 he was arrested for the rape and kidnap of another girl the same age and sentenced to treatment at a centre for sexual offenders. He was released last December having been deemed ”cured” by psychiatrists.
He moved to the Saint-Leonard area, where cheap bedsits are available to all, with no questions asked. At the grocer’s shop downstairs from his flat at 231 Rue Saint-Leonard he is described as ”someone we knew nothing about, who came downstairs to buy cigarettes”. Neighbours say he dealt in stolen cars and soft drugs.
A hundred yards away, 55-year-old Arthur Covers drinks another Stella Artois at Aux Armuriers, the bar where the girls were last seen by their parents. ”You feel an awful sense of fatalism. We had convinced ourselves that something good had come out of the Dutroux experience — like the use of DNA, the list of sex offenders and more support for families and victims. In fact, no one knew that Abdallah had previous convictions. He drank with us here like any ordinary guy.”
Up at the playground, Maertens pledges not to take her eyes off Adrienne. ”The Dutroux case didn’t really teach us anything. Dutroux was a manipulator and he tried to make us believe he was part of a paedophilia network involving famous people. Heads rolled, ministers resigned and the police force was revamped. But the real problem was and is right next to us. These paedophiles are living among us and we need to know who they are. Or they need to be locked up forever.” – Guardian Unlimited Â